Movie Of The Day: BRING IT ON (2000).

 

If you want to know something about me, I originally saw BRING IT ON in the theater — with my mom.  We both enjoyed it but probably for different reasons.  Something for everybody, I guess; you know how it is. 

 

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about cheerleading movies on this site.  It is not what one could call my métier.  As a human male with working parts, I certainly do appreciate the image of the all-American cheerleader, but I tend to prefer movies about monsters, werewolves, and fists being thrown, which is why I loved BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER so much.  Chocolate, meet peanut butter.

 

BRING IT ON arrived towards the end of a still relatively recent era in American movies, the late 1990s, where multiplexes were flooded with films about high school.  Some of them were DOA — dated on arrival — but BRING IT ON was one of the best-made of them, so I imagine it still holds up.  The director was Peyton Reed, making his first feature after plenty of TV comedy including the influential Upright Citizens Brigade show.  That’s a more anarchic pedigree than most teen movies had at the time.  The script by Jessica Bendiger is pretty sharp to begin with — it has great character names, one of my favorite aspects of good comedy scripts.

 

Kirsten Dunst, two years before SPIDER-MAN, played Torrance Shipman, team captain of the Toros, the team’s cheerleading squad.  Dunst is pretty mopey in the SPIDER-MAN movies but I imagine her performance in BRING IT ON is what got her that part:  She’s determined, energetic, and smiles in several different ways in this movie.  BUFFY‘s Eliza Dushku provides a nice, sarcastic balance as Missy Pantone, a new student who reluctantly becomes an important member of the team, and Jesse Bradford has never been as likable anywhere as he was here, as Missy’s brother and Torrance’s love interest.  Then again, I’m endeared to almost anybody in a Clash T-shirt.  Gabrielle Union is the best part of the movie by far, as Isis, the leader of a rival cheerleading squad (the Compton Clovers, brilliant name) who accuses the Toros of lifting their routines.  It turns out to be true, but it was Torrance’s predecessor who did the dirty deed.  Without belaboring the obvious, because the movie doesn’t either, it’s refreshing to see a teen movie that goes in on the issue of race and white America’s cultural appropriation of blackness.  BRING IT ON was also ahead of the curve on gender issues and homosexuality, as two of the Toros are guys, one straight and one gay.  If any of this were foregrounded too much, the movie could have been insufferable, but the writing, direction, and actors all play everything with a winning lightness of touch.

All of that is true, but what’s truly impressive about BRING IT ON is Peyton Reed’s control over the film’s tone.  The movie has a sweet, believable teen romance and a slightly more steely but still charming series of competition sequences building up towards its climax, yet it still manages to include things that could sink a different movie, like a bikini car wash scene and a truly astounding cameo by Ian Roberts of the Upright Citizens Brigade as Sparky Polastri, a choreographer who the Toros bring in as a specialist to help them develop new moves.  I would put this cameo up with Sam Kinison’s in BACK TO SCHOOL in the realm of hysterically bizarro outsized characters that somehow manage not to run away with the movie.  I’d definitely see an entire movie about this guy, though I applaud the filmmakers’ restraint in using him sparingly.

 

 

So while BRING IT ON is not normally my kind of movie, it ends up being a movie I feel kindly towards.  It doesn’t shy away from the question of sex appeal but it takes a playful approach.  It’s savvier and snappier than most high school movies, and lighter and funnier than most sports movies.  Of course I’m way more interested in the Gabrielle Union character than the Kirsten Dunst character, but this is a Hollywood movie after all.  Until somebody lets me write my own, I’ll take cultural transgression in any dosage I can get it. 

 

BRING IT ON plays tonight at 92Y Tribeca in lower Manhattan.  Take a parent and have your own mildly awkward experience.

 

 

@jonnyabomb

 

 

 

 

Now on @DailyGrindhouse: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976).

I haven’t been updating Demon’s Resume remotely enough, but a good part of that reason is because I’ve been way more active over at Daily Grindhouse.  All of the writers there are great and I encourage you to bookmark the site.  I’m very happy to be a part of that.  For the people who follow me through this site and might like more frequent updates on what I’m up to elsewhere, I’ll do a better job of keeping you posted by providing the links.

Here’s my examination of John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13.  I’m pretty proud of it.  I’m a lifelong admirer of Carpenter’s work and in this piece I spent some time discussing it in minimum and also connecting it to the rest of his filmography.

Below is a poster gallery, via Google search and copyright the respective owners.

And as always, my consciousness streams on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

 

 

Now on @DailyGrindhouse: LIZ & DICK (TV, 2012).

 

Lindsay Lohan almost ran me over once.  It’s not my greatest Hollywood anecdote, but it happened.  At the time, I was working as a production assistant on the set of a TV show in Los Angeles.  My job was to corral all the background extras for the scene into a break area in an alleyway behind this jewelry store where we were shooting.  It was a wide alley, leading out to the street — big enough for cars to drive through though narrow enough that they’d need to do so cautiously.  I stepped out in the alley to address the group, back to the street.

Suddenly, a car sped right past my left shoulder, not more than six inches from me, fast enough to be dangerous but slow enough for me to spin around and spot the familiar face in the drivers’ seat.  It was like that scene in JAWS where Brody is shoveling chum and grumbling to Quint and while his back is turned, the great white zooms right past him – only instead of a shark it was the cute redhead from MEAN GIRLS.

 

I should say “allegedly” regarding all of the above, since there were no cameras recording the incident.  Easily deniable.  As it happened, I doubt she even noticed.  So you’re free to doubt me.  But please know that character assassination is not my thing.  That’s not the goal.  Near-accidents happen.  No big deal to me, really.  I don’t hold any personal grudges against Ms. Lohan.  I’ve been almost-killed by all sorts of people, many of whom are my greatest friends. 

I only brought this up in the interest of full disclosure, because I wrote about Lindsay Lohan and the Lifetime TV movie LIZ & DICK for Daily Grindhouse and my unvarnished opinion may read to some like an act of vengeance. I can only hope that you take my word for it when I say that it was done entirely without malice.

Well, not entirely.  I mean, I hated the movie.  But I gave it my best shot.  And I don’t hate anyone who made it.  I just wish they wouldn’t have. 

Click on the picture or on this link for >>>LIZ & DICK<<< !!!

Go here for me on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

 

Now on @DailyGrindhouse: END OF WATCH (2012).

 

I wrote about the new movie END OF WATCH over at Daily Grindhouse.  It’s a good movie, worth a look if you have the nerves for it, and I tried to do it justice. 

>>>CLICK HERE FOR THE REVIEW!<<<

 

And if you’re not already, follow me on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

 

50 Best Movies Of The 1990s That @TheAVClub Didn’t Have Room For.

Don’t let the title above get me wrong: The A.V. Club’s recently-completed list of the 50 Best Films Of The ’90s is as close to a definitive consensus as anyone could ever hope for.  It’s a terrific list.  Barring the inclusion of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (I understand why they felt they needed to include it, but it’s a bad movie), there isn’t anything I could even begin to object to — in fact, most of their choices would have been mine.  But since the 1990s are the decade in which I [sort of] came of age, I thought up 50 more that could have been included.  In my opinion.  There.  Disclaimed.

Here are some of my favorite 1990s movies, any of which I could make a strong case for as the decade’s best, grouped by year NOT by numerical rank:

Incredible imagery from a true master of cinema.

Read my dissertation at Daily Grindhouse!

All three leads are brilliant in this con-man crime film written by Donald Westlake and directed by the hugely-underrated-by-film-geeks Stephen Frears.

Look at the upper left side of that poster.  There’s no better vote of confidence on the planet.

This is one of the best of the decade based on the music alone.

Known to true Bill Murray fans as the most underrated Bill Murray movie, this one was actually co-directed by our hero, and it’s an expert farce and one of the better New York movies ever.

A radio shock jock (Jeff Bridges) and a homeless man (Robin Williams) cross paths in another underrated New York movie, this one from the genius visual wizard Terry Gilliam.

This choice comes down to whichever definition of “best” you’re personally using at the time in regards to movies.  Are there more culturally resonant and artistically sophisticated movies than this one?  Sure.  Am I more likely to put one of those on at the end of a long day over this one?  Nope.

What does “best” mean?  Maybe I equivocate too much.  I’m an action guy, and this fits the term “best” under any definition.  John Woo is an artisan of cinematic mayhem and this is arguably the pinnacle of his career.

Because nobody else ever before or since made a movie like this one.

One of the few movies that genuinely emotionally moves me every time I see it.  A high point for Jeff Bridges, who has had a ton of high points.

It’s not exactly that Robert De Niro and Bill Murray trade personas here.  This movie isn’t a stunt.  It’s something way more sensitive and thoughtful than that.  But De Niro does play the meek, mild-mannered police photographer and Murray the unpredicably-violent gangster who dreams of being a stand-up.  And it was written by the great Richard Price and directed by the man who made HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER.

Enthusiasm for this movie seems to have dimmed, as has much appreciation for director Jonathan Demme (people are a little too much “What have you done for me lately?”, but this movie represents a key moment in the cultural mainstreaming of things that needed to be made mainstream at the time.  Honestly it’s been a while so I don’t know how much it all holds up, but to my memory, it was a thoughtful, character-based film about the big issues.  Terrific soundtrack also.

Well I said a bunch here and here.  This movie is a switchblade-arsenal of terrific actors, showcased with bombastic direction from Tony Scott working in concert with the unconquerably individualistic Quentin Tarantino script.  It’s kind of a nexus of everything that became important and trendy in 1990s crime and action films.

This wouldn’t make a personal top 50 or 100 or maybe not even a top 200, but it’s impeccable Disney entertaining for the widest possible audience and believe me, it still works as hugely as it did nearly twenty years ago.  (You’re old.)

C0-written by David Peoples (UNFORGIVEN), which makes it important right there.  But again, Terry Gilliam, this time challenging Bruce Willis into another great performance (Bruce always seems to do best with the most individualistic filmmakers).  Madeline Stowe is great.  And character-actor Brad Pitt beats leading-man Brad Pitt six out of seven days a week.

Super-serious great movies are easy.  Great comedies are hard.  This is one of the funniest of the decade.

Yeah, I get it.  Some of you think it’s too much.  I think it’s opera.  I think Michael Mann is criminally underappreciated by the listmakers and the award-givers.  I think it’s one of the few movies more than two hours that I can watch over and over without getting bored.  This movie got in my soul the first time I saw it, and it’s still there.

This came toward the end of John Carpenter’s remarkable run of horror and action classics, but it still has moments of colossal inspiration, and a truly memorable lead performance by the great Sam Neill.

I’ll admit it’s probably a stretch to call this one of the best movies of the 1990s, but it’s one of my favorite filmmakers, Sam Raimi, taking on one of my favorite genres, the “spaghetti” Western, and supercharging it with his anarchic cartoony innovations.  There’s more energy in this movie than in most of the Best Picture winners of the decade.

All I’m saying is, I’ve seen this one more times than I’ve seen RUSHMORE and THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS combined.

Some people maintain that this remains Paul Thomas Anderson’s best movie.  Some days I can see what they mean.  It’s certainly his tightest, most controlled, most focus, most conventional.  And it’s the Rosetta Stone where many of his later musical cues, character names, themes, and company players were first established.  For me, it’s a treat to see Robert Elswit’s camera roam around Nevada — Elswit is the (until-recently) unsung hero of Anderson’s oevre (until recently.  I also like this movie because it makes me feel like an asshole.  It was released when Anderson was 26.  You should have seen what I was doing at 26.  Feeling like an asshole is good, though – it motivates me.

This is a black, black comedy.  You gotta give these guys credit — they did not take the easy road after DUMB & DUMBER kick-started their careers.  Even THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY goes to some daring places (it’s a romantic comedy about stalking, after all), but it’s nowhere near as nasty as this one.  And once again, Bill Murray, comedy’s supreme ninja master, comes in for a few scenes and completely destroys throughout every single moment he appears.

Chris Rock’s favorite Tim Burton movie.  I don’t have a favorite Tim Burton movie — impossible for me to choose — but this one is up there.  It’s pure anarchy on film.  Somebody gave the creepy kid down the street complete access to fireworks and all the best toys — expensive sets, costumes, huge movie stars — and he went to work blowing them all up with demented glee.  (Demented Glee is my favorite Fox TV show, by the way.)  It was a stroke of inspiration to reframe the alien invasion movie as a 1970s-style disaster movie, and to make the whole thing a comedy.  This weirded out a country more interested in the more straightforward INDEPENDENCE DAY, but I’m with the weird kid.

Because as much credit as Eddie Murphy and Rick Baker get for their brilliance, it still isn’t enough.

A case could be made for THE TRUMAN SHOW as the best Jim Carrey movie of the 1990s (maybe ever, barring ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND), but I’m a fan of the big weird risk and the sudden detour and the critical and popular underdog.  THE CABLE GUY is even weirder than you may remember, and in retrospect it paved the way for enduring cult comedies to follow like ZOOLANDER and ANCHORMAN.

Best-of lists always go heavy on lauding the director and the actors, but how about the screenwriters?  You know, the guys and gals without whom the entire movie would not exist in the first place?  Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski are the kings of the gonzo biopics of the 1990s, with ED WOOD, MAN ON THE MOON, and this, the story of Hustler founder Larry Flynt.  Woody Harrelson is incredible in the role, and the whole thing, under the stewardship of the mighty Milos Forman, is a raunchy, raucous, searing, and sad affair.

Leon Gast’s film is one of THE essential sports documentaries ever made.  It’s the story of Muhammad Ali’s match against George Foreman for the title of heavyweight champion of the world.  The ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ took place in Africa in 1974, and the movie is supercharged with electric history.

In my local paper at the time, the shoddy film critic referred to this movie with a cheap shot: “Lifeless, Ordinary.”  It’s anything but.  It’s everything but.  The follow-up to TRAINSPOTTING from the team of Danny Boyle, John Hodge, and Andrew McDonald is a deranged, delirious trip through America.  It’s colorful and kinetic and enthusiastically acted and it sounds like a million bucks.  (Why not?)  It’s boistrous and unruly and maybe a little too self-indulgent, but it’s my kind of self-indulgent — the boldly original kind – so the complainers can go screw.

In 1997, Kevin Smith was still a filmmaker who led with his heart and inspired an entire generation of creatively-inclined young’uns to write with honesty and candor.  Smith’s first four movies were sloppily-made but felt incredibly personal, and CHASING AMY was maybe the rawest of them all.  I’m not sure I could revisit it now any more than I’d like to look at a high school yearbook, but I’m grateful for that long-ago validation the success of CHASING AMY gave me and a ton of more-famous, more influential up-and-comers. As for Smith, he made an encouraging return to form with the flawed but fiery RED STATE. Unfortunately, he seems to be more interested in everything BUT filmmaking nowadays. Too bad.

There’s over-the-top pulp, and then there’s JOHN WOO over-the-top pulp.  This is the most gloriously operatic and unrestrained of any of John Woo’s Hollywood movies, and both of its stars seem to have been stuck in that mode ever since.

The first BABE is pure sweetness and you should definitely see it too, but this is the one directed by George Miller, of MAD MAX fame.  It’s wilder, sadder, scarier, and even more bizarre.  It’s great.  George Miller doesn’t work nearly enough.

Michael Mann again.  This is his most high-minded movie, and there’s no reason it should be remotely as watchable and rewatchable as it is.  It’s about network TV, journalism, and big tobacco, and yet it’s suspenseful, moving, and entertaining as all hell.  So much of that comes from the dynamic, unusual directing choices of Mann, working with his DP from HEAT, Dante Spinotti.  The musical selection, both of score and soundtrack, is impeccable and distinctive as it ever is with Mann, and the editing style is somewhat hypnotic.  Of course the script by Mann and Eric Roth is impeccable, and then you have a roster of some of the world’s greatest actors, led by Al Pacino in maybe his last truly excellent role, and Russell Crowe, who was so ridiculously incredible in his transformative role that the Oscars realized they fucked up by not giving him Best Actor for this movie and corrected it the next year. 

Still the best Superman movie since Richard Donner was making ‘em.

Look, I’ve had it up to here with M. Night Shyamalan too, but no one, not even Shyamalan himself, can strike this one from the win column.  It’s a very solid script accompanied by thoughftul direction, with an unusually soft-spoken and gentle performance from Bruce.

This movie came on like a revelation from director David O. Russell, who had made two small movies at that point and no one could have expected him to make an action-comedy/war movie with an eclectic ensemble cast (including director Spike Jonze!) with raucous energy and actual formal innovations (with bleached-out cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel).  It’s like KELLY’S HEROES but with more of a social conscience.  This is one of the reasons people think of 1999 as a banner year for American film.

A bizarre and beautiful chimera that is a perfectly-modulated melding of the sensibilities of Jim Jarmusch and The RZA.  Contains what is probably the last of the great wackadoo Henry Silva performances.

______________________________

Find me on Twitter:  @jonnyabomb

Screenings in NYC: BEVERLY HILLS COP III (1994).

BEVERLY HILLS COP III is not as bad as anyone says it is.  That’s not to say it’s particularly great.  And maybe you shouldn’t listen to me anyway, because I saw it more than once in the theaters, and I can promise you that at the time I was as excited to see a new BEVERLY HILLS COP movie as most people my age would have been to see a new STAR WARS movie.  Most guys my age grew up wanting to be Han Solo.  I grew up wanting to be Axel Foley.  And a movie where Axel Foley investigates a murder at an amusement park?  Directed by John Landis (ANIMAL HOUSE, THE BLUES BROTHERS, SPIES LIKE US)?  Yeah, that’s a movie a sixteen-year-old Jon Abrams wants to see very much, thank you.

The first BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984, d. Martin Brest) is a pretty-much perfect Hollywood movie, a fish-out-of-water story with genuinely hysterical one-liners, an earworm of a main theme, a terrific supporting cast that includes Ronny Cox, John Ashton, Judge Reinhold, and the super-cute Lisa Eilbacher, at least two enjoyably-hissable villains (Steven Berkoff and BREAKING BAD‘s Jonathan Banks), and a comedic supernova of a leading man in Eddie Murphy, on a streak that went from Saturday Night Live to 48 HRS. to TRADING PLACES to his concert film DELIRIOUS and then here, to the biggest box-office hit of 1984.

The second BEVERLY HILLS COP II recently got a bump in its critical esteem with the too-belated outpouring of respect for the work of its director, Tony Scott.  I’m a big Tony Scott fan, but not as much a fan of BEVERLY HILLS COP II.  It’s a few notes too aggressive for my tastes, with villains that aren’t as much fun to hate (Jürgen Prochnow, Brigitte Nielsen, Dean Stockwell, and Gilbert Gottfried) and a dark and depressing overcast that sees Ronny Cox’s Capt. Bogomil sidelined throughout the entire movie.  The first film had moments of real darkness and danger that made it work for me, but somehow it was upsetting to have a character I liked so much shot down and left by the side of the road like that.  It must be how nerds of a different variety feel about Hicks and Newt in ALIEN 3.

Of course, Ronny Cox didn’t even show up for BEVERLY HILLS COP III.  As he told the great Will Harris over at the Onion’s A.V. Club, the script (allegedly) wasn’t so hot.  John Ashton (Sgt. Taggart) didn’t show up either, reportedly unavailable due to scheduling.  Those two characters, Bogomil and Taggart, were the strongest foils to Eddie Murphy’s  Axel Foley character, and their grudgingly warming up to him is what gave the franchise almost all of its heart and soul.  Without them, something’s missing.  In BEVERLY HILLS COP III, Bogomil goes unmentioned and we’re told that Taggart retired and moved out of state.  Even the puppyish Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold’s character) is trying to act more serious and mature.  Rosewood has a new, gruff, mustachioed partner, Jon Flint, played by Hector Elizondo, but let’s face it, the only one happy about that replacement is Garry Marshall.   The third movie, even more than the second, feels like its genesis was motivated out of less than artistic reasons.

BAM Cinematek is playing BEVERLY HILLS COP III as part of their terrific “American Gagsters: Great Comedy Teams” film series.  I’m torn between applauding the left-field choice and wondering why they didn’t go with the more popular and frankly more successful pairings of Eddie Murphy and director John Landis – TRADING PLACES and COMING TO AMERICA.  Those two films were much bigger creative and critical successes, and along with 48 HRS. and the first BEVERLY HILLS COP, are the foundation of Eddie Murphy’s onscreen comedic persona.  Apparently, John Landis and Eddie Murphy had a serious falling-out after COMING TO AMERICA (my heart hurts just typing that), and BEVERLY HILLS COP III was their reunion.  It came at a time (1994) when Eddie’s fortunes were shifting a little — his movies continued to make money but among many of his fans, they weren’t nearly as universally beloved.  Maybe Eddie was trying to recapture some of the old magic by bringing Landis back.  It could have worked.

I’ve always wondered what the tipping point was with Eddie Murphy.  For a time, he could do no wrong.  Then I started hearing people bagging on his movies, and what a disappointment he’d become.  No one thinks he still isn’t, somewhere inside himself, the most incendiary and fucking funniest comedian on the planet, but plenty of people seem to think he’s given up.  I don’t see it that way, but venture off my page and look elsewhere on the internet — it gets scary out there.  I think I can argue my point with the clear evidence that there are plenty of bright spots in Eddie’s post-1980s output:  THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (obviously), DOCTOR DOOLITTLE (fuck you, I laughed), LIFE (hugely underrated), BOWFINGER (a little underrated, definitely underseen), DREAMGIRLS (all-the-awards-worthy), TOWER HEIST (his performance, not the movie, which is otherwise pretty lame).

But there was a definite shift in Eddie’s persona that happened between COMING TO AMERICA and BEVERLY HILLS COP III.  The wisecracking, authority-demolishing, devil-may-care Eddie started to get romantic.  In my opinion, this really kicked into gear with BOOMERANG, a movie some people still love a lot, though you’ll see early traces of it in COMING TO AMERICA and then in Eddie’s own directorial debut, HARLEM NIGHTS.  I don’t have a problem with that — why shouldn’t Eddie get some onscreen, same as any other movie hero? — and in fact film historian Donald Bogle raised a similar point about BEVERLY HILLS COP — exactly why isn’t Lisa Eilbacher a romantic interest for Eddie in that movie?  (Of course we all know the old bad answer to that one.)  But when a comedy icon becomes a romantic lead, that requires some changes to his onscreen persona.  BOOMERANG Eddie Murphy is going to have to be a different guy in a lot of ways than 48 HRS. Eddie Murphy, or even GOLDEN CHILD Eddie Murphy.

In keeping with this line of thought, here’s one element of BEVERLY HILLS COP III that is actually underrated, and even better than the previous two installments:  Axel Foley gets a love interest, and she’s actually worthwhile, at least by 1990s big-budget comedy romantic interest standards.  Theresa Randle is an actress we don’t see much anymore, but she worked with Spike Lee and Abel Ferrara and had a role in both BAD BOYS movies.  She has a rather thankless role in BEVERLY HILLS COP III, as a park employee who helps Axel Foley out, and the romance doesn’t go too far, but at least it’s played by a capable actress who can suggest some subtext.

Maybe I’m easy on BEVERLY HILLS COP III because of that reason, or because on BAM’s page they have a John Landis quote which makes it sound more promising than it ended up:  “I was attracted by the marvelous premise of a murder in Disneyland, a subversive idea. And I couldn’t resist the thought of creating a world of wonders, immersed in illusion.”  The second half of that quote is Landis overselling it a little, but the first half is a genuinely good reason to make a movie, especially for a gleeful cinematic anarchist like him.  There are a few factors why the final edit of the movie feels more toothless than it should — budgetary cuts, rumblings of creative differences — but there’s still stuff to enjoy. The director cameos.  The name of the main villain (“Ellis DeWald.” Say it! It’s fun!)  The orchestral reworking of the “Axel F” theme, by Chic’s Nile Rodgers.  The fact that so far, fingers crossed maybe, it’s the last time we’ve seen Eddie Murphy’s most iconic character  a movie screen.  You guys go hang out with Han Solo all you want.  I’d still rather hang out with this guy.

BEVERLY HILLS COP III plays tonight at BAM Rose Cinemas.

@jonnyabomb

Screenings in NYC: THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998).

The Big Lebowski.  To watch it once is sublime.  To watch it twenty times is sublime twenty times.  To watch it with a full crowd is probably about as much fun as is legally possible within city limits.  I’ve seen it with small groups many times, but I’ve only actually seen it with a crowd once, back in 1998 when it was first released.  As the credits rolled, my buddy and I turned to each other and both said, “I could’ve watched that all day.”  The rest of the world has since come to share in our enlightenment.  In the intervening years, the Lebowski legend has only grown, and pretty much everyone with a brain and a soul and a sense of humor is in agreement.

It’s actually really hard to write about The Big Lebowski because it’s such well-trod turf and because it’s such an individualistic piece of work that its primary charms are in watching it, not having it described to you.  Of course, if you know your film history, you know that The Big Lebowski didn’t spring up out of nowhere — it’s a fairly direct takeoff of Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (a distant relative of yours truly, for the record).  I was lucky enough in 1998 to have just chanced to watch The Big Sleep for the first time about a week before I saw The Big Lebowski for the first time.  I can’t possibly understate how
much funnier The Big Lebowski is when you’re in on the joke:  The pointed difference between 1940s Los Angeles and 1990s Los Angeles, the jazzy past versus the country-Western present, the labyrinthine mystery plot that one suspects even the screenwriters couldn’t decipher (and in The Big Lebowski at least, treat as almost an afterthought), and most of all. Jackie Treehorn’s dick drawing.

In The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart tries to get a vital clue from running a pencil over the indentations of a notepad.  In The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges attempts the same trick, only to find that his adversary has been idly doodling penises while on the phone.  That joke is incredibly hilarious on its own, but once you realize that it’s a spoof of a deadly-serious source, it becomes transcendently funny.

The Coens’ brilliant inspiration was to take a Chandleresque noir set-up, and then drop two amazing and ridiculous characters into it to see how they’d handle things.  First there’s Jeff Bridges as The Dude, about which plenty has been written and said but not as often the fact that the character is based off a real person the Coens know.  And then there’s John Goodman as the bellowing and verbose gun nut Walter, who again is a stroke of genius even if you don’t know that he is playing a real person with very little exaggeration.  John Milius is a writer and filmmaker who was an early confederate of Steven Spielberg and the 1970s film-school generation, who had a hand in the writing of the Indianapolis speech in Jaws and in one of the Dirty Harry sequels, and who made the vastly misunderstood and thoroughly awesome 1982 adaptation of the Conan The Barbarian pulp stories.  If you’ve ever listened to the incredible DVD commentary for Conan The Barbarian, you’d know that what John Goodman is actually doing in The Big Lebowski is a pitch-perfect John Milius impersonation.

Goodman.

Milius.

Like I say, The Big Lebowski is funny enough without knowing these little factlets, but it becomes a new level of comedic achievement when seen in that light.

Another great joke of The Big Lebowski is that for a movie about confused bowlers of conflicting political ideologies solving mysteries, it is as impeccably crafted as any prestige picture.  The photography by Roger Deakins is typically beautiful, the editing by the legendary Roderick Jaynes is crisp and sharp.  Just think back on those elaborately-choreographed and inventive Busby Berkeley dream-sequence numbers.  This isn’t lazy filmmaking by any stretch.  It’s as smart and as artistic as any so-called “Best Picture.”

The Coens are such an interesting case.  They work in two distinct modes: madcap and noir.  The first mode is exemplified by their comedies, a la Raising Arizona.  The second mode is the Miller’s Crossing mode, which dates all the way forward to their recent triumph No Country For Old Men.  (There’s actually a third, far more esoteric and personal mode, which includes movies like Barton Fink and A Serious Man, but that’s a subject for another day).  The Big Lebowski comes down stronger on the side of comedy, though it’s an intriguing blend of madcap and noir.  The stakes, as far as The Dude and Walter know, are real:  A young woman could be killed if they don’t deliver a ransom.  But the fact that these two guys are the world’s least-qualified messengers, who spend their private-dick downtime at the bowling alley, is what makes the movie so fresh and so funny.

For having said up front that The Big Lebowski is hard to write about, I sure have found plenty of words.  I guess it IS fun to write about.  But I’d still rather go watch it again.

The Big Lebowski is screening tonight FOR FREE in Central Park.

And I’m 24-7 over here: @jonnyabomb

THE SHIELD (2002-2008).

For some reason it’s been coming up in conversation a lot recently, so I’ve got The Shield on the brain.  Here’s something I wrote back in 2008, when the show ended.  My argument was that, as much as I share the love for The Sopranos and The Wire, The Shield is weirdly underrated when it comes to the great TV series of the past decade.

 

Truth be told, I don’t get the chance to follow that much television – episodic TV has gotten so dense and narratively sophisticated that most of the shows worth following demand one-hundred-percent involvement.  It probably says something about which shows I choose to follow religiously, but I definitely haven’t watched too much TV outside of the shows I do watch that way.  So I don’t know what the “Best” anything is; I only know which shows I find to be the most subjectively awesome, and this year that was The Shield.

The Shield is an ugly show, in the greatest sense of the word.  It has no fear in showing the worst sides of decent people and the truest sides of truly ugly people.  It’s not interested in selling you a line of bullshit, though it is interested in showing you how some people would sell you a line of bullshit.  So much of television is coated with makeup, designed to sell high-priced clothes and celebrity gossip magazines.  The Shield is, unusually, bravely, committed to ugliness.  The look of the show follows suit:  While long-time DP Rohn Schmidt is surely capable of shooting pretty pictures (see his work on Frank Darabont’s The Mist), the name of the game here is dingy steadi-cam, “found footage,” and harsh lighting.  While I’m sure the cast of actors are all attractive enough people in real life, in The Shield they are unanimously brave enough to frequently be filmed in less than their best light.  The most frequent subjects are of course the Strike Team:  Detectives Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), Curtis “Lemonhead” Lemansky (Kenny Johnson), Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell), and later Julien Lowe (Michael Jace).  All decent-looking fellas, as that goes, but very often filmed as ogres in the course of the show – and that is of course, by design.

When an overtly attractive character appears on The Shield, it’s time to worry about their safety – pretty people don’t last long in this universe.  Exhibit A: Det. Tevon Garris (Brian White), well-remembered but short-lasting member of the Strike Team.  Either they get killed off, discredited, sent packing, or brutally disfigured.

One of the better in-jokes of the series is rookie officer Tina Hanlon’s last line in the final episode – “I made it.”  Played by the lovely Paula Garcés, I was sure that the character of Tina was destined for extinction, but of course I should have remembered that Tina wasn’t quite as pretty on the insides.

I’m harping on this point a little too long because I think it matters.  In a visual medium such as television, looks are important, and so how a meticulously planned and executed story such as The Shield looks, is a good starting point for overview.  And no character is shown in as unflattering a light as Detective Vic Mackey (played by Michael Chiklis, who gives a legendary seven-seasons-long performance worthy of every acting award they can sculpt.)  Make no mistake:  Mackey is a bad person.  There are shades of gray along the way, but those are lost in the vast blackness as the series progresses.  Shield creator Shawn Ryan and his writers, and Michael Chiklis and his fellow actors (all of the ones I’ve mentioned so far and the rest I haven’t yet), are all inspiringly crafty in how they’ve laid out the moral universe of the show.  Vic Mackey is very definitely a bad person.  He is a corrupt cop who kills a fellow cop, because he was investigating him – this is depicted in the very FIRST episode.  Yet, if we stick with the show, over the course of seven seasons we are constantly rooting for Mackey and his partners to get away dirty.  (There’s no getting away “clean” for anybody here.)

That’s all to do with the charisma Chiklis brings to the character.  Charisma, not charm.  There’s a major difference.  The audience of The Shield is caught rooting for a monster.  We also get to know the various members of the Strike Team, who start out at varying levels of likability and corruption (with Lem generally considered the best and Shane generally the worst), and through their complicity with Mackey, are brought to much lower levels of the latter, and somehow, higher levels of the former.

Walton Goggins is probably the overall MVP of the show’s final seasons, as he took a character that started out as a wild-eyed racist horndog and ended the show reaching new heights of doomed sympathy, although Kenny Johnson, as the generally good-natured and guilt-wracked Lem, was far and away the sad star of Season Five, and David Rees Snell comes all the way from the background character who always seemed to get the worst of it, to a dynamic force and Mackey’s last loyal partner in Season Seven, where his luck remains unfortunately consistent.

As I start to get lost in praise for the creators on- and off-camera, I haven’t even gotten to CCH Pounder and Jay Karnes as Detectives Wyms and Waggenbach, whose characters come as close to honest and capable of real friendship as this show gets, even though she’s doomed herself, and he’s more than a little creepy (see the cat incident in Season Three).  And then there’s Benito Martinez as David Aceveda, the police captain and eventual politician who is probably Mackey’s leading archenemy over the course of the series, who is arguably the bravest actor in a cast full of brave actors (true fans know I’m talking about Season Three).

Also, The Shield is better than any other show I have ever seen at logically, convincingly, and invisibly integrating bigger-named guest stars into the cast, as anyone who followed the stints of Glenn Close, Forest Whitaker, Franka Potente, and most gloriously surprising, Anthony Anderson, will agree.

But this last season, which finished airing in November, the guest star characters were all gone, and we were left with what remains of the core cast members.  (Not all of the main characters make it out alive.)  And I have to tell you quite honestly, the series ended with a final episode more satisfying than any other I have ever seen.  More satisfying than many movies even, which at its best, is the strength of TV – the longer and the better you get to know the characters, the more impact the resolution of their story might be.  And the resolution of The Shield, such as it is, has a whole mess of impact.  It’s like life – the good guys, if there even are any, don’t necessarily get what they deserve, though some of the bad guys do.  What you thought you wanted, you don’t get.  What you thought you wanted, you get and wish you didn’t.  What you didn’t know what you wanted, you get just a little of it.  What you never expected to break your heart, does.

Now:  Does Vic Mackey get what he deserves?

Not a question for me to answer here.  I don’t want to ruin it for anyone yet to discover the last few scenes of the series.  All I want to say is that I was entirely satisfied by how it ended.  It felt right.  I’d love to know what other people thought, and if you haven’t seen the show, start at the beginning and dig through those DVDs.  It’s great.  I haven’t felt this much of a vacuum at a show’s departure since The Sopranos.

The Shield has truth in it, in its way.  The show started out trying to get at certain ugly truths about power and the corrupting power of lies, and its high quality and its truth stayed consistent all the way through.  I’ve lived in Los Angeles for eight years, and I will tell you that, while there are certainly exaggerations for dramatic requirements, I recognize Los Angeles in The Shield.  Not the Los Angeles they show you on most other shows, with the beaches and the high-end stores and the glass facades and the bleached blondes, but the Los Angeles that lives further east and to the south.  The Shield has the ability to shock you, the way LA itself has the ability to shock you.

[A big salute to my homeboy Jimmy G. for first lending me the Season 1 DVD way back, which sent me tearing through the rest of the series to date.]

One last thing:

I noticed that every mention of The Shield’s finale seemed to invoke either the series endings of The Sopranos, or The Wire, or both.  I’m an equal fan, arguably even a student, of all three shows.  I say this having seen every single episode of all three series, some more than once.  (Which explains where my twenties went.)

So while I can get into it, I’d rather not compare three series I am very fond of against each other, particularly because all three are after different thematic and creative goals.

In the case of The Sopranos, it’s an entirely different animal.  First of all, The Sopranos is filled with moments of blackest comedy, while The Shield is many things, but funny is never one of them.  More importantly, The Sopranos is about America, about family, and about crooks.  Cops rarely, if ever, figure into it.  The Shield is about L.A. in specific, family is only a pretense (at least for Mackey), and it still is very much a cop show, even though it inverts and subverts the formula that other shows continue to feed us.  As a cop show, The Shield still wants to deliver on some fronts, without ambiguity.  I bet you anything that even David Chase would agree that, when it comes to series finales, The Shield ends on the more dramatically satisfying note.

In the case of The Wire, it’s a little trickier.  Both shows are cop shows, or at least start out that way – they take the old standard of the cop show and have their way with it.  But The Wire is very different from The Shield – it has just a little to do with hope, whereas The Shield provides no such thing.  As much as The Wire is very clearly an angry invective against a broken system, it still ends up on the screen as ultimately a more optimistic, even utopian, vision in some ways.  The Shield isn’t going to lift you anywhere – it starts out with teeth bared snarling, and ends the same way.

But I don’t think you have to choose.

If you love The Wire, you still might love The Shield.  All those Wire people who want a new drug may do well to go back and learn The Shield, especially because the two shows share a secret weapon:  the under-lauded show-builder Clark Johnson, who set the directorial styles of both shows in their inaugural episodes, directed several episodes throughout, and directed both finales (and appeared in them both as an actor).

Wire fans, I ask you:  What does Clark Johnson know that you don’t?

12.31.2008.

 

 

Screening in NYC: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976).

Assault On Precinct 13 is screening this weekend as the IFC Center’s midnight movie.  It’s a stone-cold must-see if you’ve never had the pleasure, and a terrific choice to watch in the middle of the night, its most natural habitat.

With respect to fans of Dark Star, Carpenter’s first major credit as director, Assault On Precinct 13 is the first true expression of Carpenter’s individualistic style and worldview.  (Dark Star was a collaboration with Dan O’Bannon, an auteur of horror and science-fiction in his own right.)  Carpenter wrote, directed, edited, and scored Assault On Precinct 13.  Virtually all of his best-known and best-regarded works have seen him acting in two or more of these capacities.   Assault On Precinct 13 is often underrated and overshadowed due to the massive success and influence of Carpenter’s next movie, Halloween, but it’s a significant film – ballsy, brutal, and still ridiculously entertaining.

The movie begins with a minimalist credit sequence — red titles on a black screen, with Carpenter’s own electronic score emerging out from the darkness.  The second that score kicks in, you’re on notice that you’re inside a movie with its own vibe.  It’s a horror-movie score, which is striking to this day because the movie is an urban crime film, a cops-and-crooks-with-guns action-thriller.  At the time, these kinds of movies starred the likes of Clint Eastwood and Richard Roundtree and Charles Bronson — the music was more upbeat and stirring, done by composers like Lalo Schifrin and Jerry Fielding, or by R&B artists in the blaxploitation genre.  You’re getting the news from your ears even before your eyes and your brain — this movie is different.

The story starts in with a very deliberate pace.  Carpenter has suggested since that maybe the pacing is too deliberate, that maybe he’d move things along quicker if he had it to do over again.  I think it works very nicely as it is.  We actually start with the villains, a Los Angeles street gang who lose some members in a police raid and swear revenge in a blood oath.  The gang are unusual for two reasons — one, they are a pan-racial gang, which is standard business for Hollywood, but rarely acknowledged directly.  The police band in the movie makes specific mention of the multi-cultural make-up of the gang.  The other, more crucial distinction is that these gang members are entirely without dialogue, almost entirely without character.  They are amoral automatons, silent killers, precursors of the Michael Myers character in Halloween.  Once their motive for revenge is set, there is no reasoning with them, no dissuading them.

The main plot kicks in when a suburban father and his young daughter stop in a bad neighborhood.  The dad goes to make a phone call, and the little girl wanders over to an ice cream truck nearby.  Wrong place, wrong time.  The gang drives past, seemingly disappearing over the horizon.  But just when all seems clear, they show up, almost supernaturally, beside the truck.  Their business is with the truck driver, but the little girl decides to make herself known at just the wrong moment.

It’s still shocking today, since no matter how nasty that American movie violence can get, little kids are almost always spared from the carnage.  This is probably the movie’s most infamous moment, and its post-script is equally haunting when you find out that the little girl grew up to be a reality-TV star.  It’s a true-life turn of events that validates the movie’s unsentimental world view.

   

Driven mad by the sight of his little girl lying dead, the father grabs a gun and shoots down one of the gang members.  He runs off, and they give chase.  The father finally seeks refuge at the nearest police precinct, although he goes into shock and is unable to relate the events that brought him there.  The precinct is no safe haven, however, as it’s set to be shut down and is only manned by a skeleton crew, led by Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker).  Complicating matters is the fact that a prison bus bearing a handful of convincts has stopped overnight at the precinct due to one of them being deathly ill.  So when the silent armies of vicious gang members descend upon the embattled precinct, Bishop has no choice but to enlist the craftier of the convicts to help fight them off.

Much has been made of the general knowledge that Assault On Precinct 13 is a blended cocktail of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead.  It would be apparent even if Carpenter hadn’t made it so explicit — both by confirming it, and by crediting himself as “John T. Chance” as the film’s editor (John T. Chance is the name of John Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo.)  Carpenter adored the films of Howard Hawks, which spanned genres, favored tough-guy banter, and favored uncommonly tough women.  It’s why he remade a Hawks film a few years later (The Thing).  Rio Bravo is a classic Western centering around an embattled lawman, the Wayne character, who jails the brother of a dangerous outlaw and has to rely on a trio of unlikely deputies, including Dean Martin!, to help him hold things down while they wait for reinforcements.

The parallels to Night Of The Living Dead are equally apparent: the traumatized victim seeking refuge from approaching hordes, the silent mob surging against the walls outside, the casting of a black man in the heroic lead and treating it like no big deal even though for the era it totally was.  Like Duane Jones as Ben in Night Of The Living Dead, Austin Stoker as Bishop isn’t a swaggering badass like John Shaft or Truck Turner — he’s just a good guy in an impossible situation who proves to be the exact guy you want beside you in that situation.  Of course, the ending of Night Of The Living Dead makes Ben’s blackness a hauntingly important matter after all — but in Assault On Precinct 13, Bishop didn’t necessarily have to be played by a black actor.  He could just as easily been played by Paul Newman, to name just one.  This is another reason I so greatly admire Carpenter’s films:  He’s never been afraid of race, but it’s not a highly-politized issue to him.  Some of the most charismatic, lovable, and heroic characters in his films are black, or Asian, or elderly, or female, and not for any great inclusive reason.  His stories treat the people in them as people, not stereotypes or causes.  This egalitarian, progressive spirit is laudable and refreshing, because of how terribly rare it is in American film, particularly in the horror and action genres within which Carpenter so often works.

And again, the fact that Assault On Precinct 13 is an urban crime actioner with the set-up of a Western and the soul of a horror movie is what gives it such memorable friction.  Beyond his considerable cinematic facility, his eye for casting and his mind for contemporary myth-making, Carpenter’s particular genius lies in how he melded his disparate and recognizable influences into such dynamic and eccentric genre films.  Assault On Precinct 13 is a spooky city-Western.  In addition to the widely-acknowledged inspiration of Hawks and Romero, Carpenter also incorporates a subtle Sergio Leone influence into his methodology.  At one point, one of the cons refers to himself as having “something to do with death”, which is a conspicuous nod to Once Upon A Time In The West.  I’m not just talking about superficial referencing — I’m talking about a thematic kinship.  All you have to do is look at the ice cream truck scene, and its spiritual ancestor in a similar scene in Once Upon A Time In The West: If Henry Fonda had never pulled that trigger, would Assault On Precinct 13 have been able to send poor Kim Richards to her fate?

Brutal.

I think what draws me so loyally to the films of John Carpenter isn’t so different than what draws me to the films of Sergio Leone:  They’re entertaining as all hell, quotable, musical, packed with indelible moments, but there’s also a fierce philosophy underlying all the quips and the fireworks.  Life’s hard for almost everyone, and frequently unfair.  But you keep your head down and you keep your chin up, paradoxically:  You weather it all, and you keep your sense of humor at all times.

In the final reel, you could be Dr. Loomis, still and always looking around in the dark for Michael Myers.  All you get is what you started with.

You could be Snake Plissken, having gone to all that trouble for uncaring politicians.  All you get is one last laugh.

You could be MacReady and Childs, out in the cold by a dying fire.  All you get is a slug on a flask and a whole lot of unanswered questions.

You could be Jack Burton, having had the brief thrill of victory and experiencing the comedown.  All you get is the open road (and a beast in the backseat).

All that’s how I read into it, anyway.  If there’s a unifying theme here, it’s impermanence and uncertainty, sure, but it’s also, most crucially, stoicism.  Maybe you’ll win in the end and maybe you won’t.  Because in the end, nobody exactly wins this game anyway.  That’s something to do with death.

Find me on Twitter: @jonnyabomb

 

Movie Review: DRIVE (2011).

I’ve been thinking about something lately, and seeing Drive recently turned out to be a bit of synchronicity since, in its own way, Drive is largely an illustration of the concept: Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean it isn’t real.  And vice versa.  Drive isn’t something that happened.  It started as a terrific, mean little novel by James Sallis, and was adapted into a screenplay by Hossein Amini, envisioned by director Nicolas Winding Refn with star Ryan Gosling, and filmed (impeccably) by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel.  It’s an incredible movie, far and away one of the most accomplished of this year, but it’s not reportage.  It’s a daydream for nighttime.

Somehow, that makes it truer than many movies that purport to be “based on a true story.”

The story is as simple and quite frankly, as familiar as any in noir history:  The central character is a young man (Ryan Gosling) known only as Driver.  That naming comes from the book and the press: he’s never named in the film, at best only called “The Kid”.  His only friend is a man named Shannon (Breaking Bad‘s phenomenal Bryan Cranston), a crippled mechanic who keeps Driver employed by day as a stunt driver for the movies, and at night as a wheelman for low-level armed robbery jobs.  Driver lives by himself in a sparse apartment in Los Angeles.  Eventually, he forms a potentially romantic connection with a young mother (Carey Mulligan) and her son, whose father (named Standard, played by Oscar Isaac) is set to return from jail soon.  As Shannon puts Driver in contact with movie producer Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his underworld affiliate Nino (Ron Perlman), Driver’s personal and criminal lives are due to intersect.  Basically, the loner meets a nice lady as he’s descending deeper into darkness.  Oldest noir tale in the book; all it’s missing is the femme fatale.  What makes this movie so dramatically far apart from business as usual is its style.  This movie is so distinctly orchestrated that, even though on paper it’s similar to so many other movies, on film it resembles a precious few.

Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the most compelling visual stylists working in movies today.  Here he’s made what feels exactly like a long-lost Michael Mann movie, frozen somewhere between 1983 and 1986 and thawed out just now for a modern audience.  Guys, I don’t think I have a higher caliber of compliment in the chamber than that one.  Honestly, the movie that Drive most resembles is Mann’s 1981 breakthrough feature Thief:  It has the same seemingly languid yet impeccably deliberate pace, the roiling mood, the shocking outbursts of realistic violence, the addictively throbbing electronic score, the exacting attention to detail, the blue-collar sidekick played by a familiar TV actor (Cranston in for James Belushi), the bizarre but thunderingly effective left-field casting choices (Willie Nelson as the heart of Thief, Albert Brooks as the snake in Drive) — it’d be easy to describe Drive as the most successful Michael Mann homage in memory, except for the fact that it’s its own thing. Refn has been building up to exactly this, for a while now.  Drive is an irresistible blend of the stylized realism of Bronson (2008) and the universalized dreaminess of Valhalla Rising (2009).  It also brings a whole new color palette: While Michael Mann favors steel blues and pistol grays, Refn experiments with warmer colors like greens, browns, and even pinks.  Somehow, both interpretations of Los Angeles are apt.

Having spent a formative portion of my life in Los Angeles, I have always recognized a measure of truth in Michael Mann’s movies.  Mann shoots L.A. the way L.A. looks to me.  In his first movie set in Los Angeles, Nicolas Winding Refn manages the same feat.  It’s not just the look; it’s also the atmosphere.  In a scene where Driver takes Irene (Mulligan’s character) and her son on a joy ride through the L.A. river, it looks and feels just the way L.A. looks and feels at sunset.  One reason so many people discount the virtues of Los Angeles is because we’re pummeled with pedestrian images on TV shows such as 90210 and Entourage; uninspired, pansy shit selling emptiness.  There is actual beauty to Los Angeles if you know where to find it, along with an existential isolation and a visceral spookiness; all of which is contained within Drive.

So I recognize this movie to be true.  It fits in with my experience, particularly now, when I am thinking and writing about Los Angeles from the East Coast.  In my mind, my memories merge with cinematic imagery: In my opinion, that’s how both individual memory and the art of cinema work; it’s why movies mean so much to so many of us.  So while I’m not half the driver that Driver is (an understatement), while I’ve never carried on with the estranged wife of an imprisoned felon (as far as I know), while I’ve never taken a blunt instrument to a strip club owner (that I can remember), there is a lot contained in Drive that I can attest to resembling the world of Los Angeles.  This is one reason I loved the movie so much.

I’m also fully enamored of Refn’s style, most particularly the way he works with violence on-screen — his editing rhythms and lolling camerawork manage to lull the audience nearly into a trance, which makes the sudden eruption of savagery all the more unsettling.  It creates the effect in people that violence in movies should have: it makes violence scary.

I also love the way that, just as he did in Bronson, Refn perfectly deploys music, both the score by Cliff Martinez (Traffic) and the poppy Euro-trash electro-candy that punctuates the ongoing events.  The music is both functional, enhancing the mood of the story, and diagetic, which means that the songs that are playing on the soundtrack are often the songs that Driver is listening to in his car or in his apartment.  It’s easy to imagine (as Refn and Gosling intended), that these are the songs Driver chooses because of how they make him feel about himself, which is the way that most of us listen to our favorite music, which in fact tells as much about a person as any dialogue passage could ever do.  The one song that’s repeated throughout Drive, “A Real Hero” by College featuring Electric Youth, seems to be the most indicative of Driver’s inner thoughts, since he sure doesn’t speak them aloud.

Right there’s another thing to love, the performances.  Ryan Gosling seems like such a canny dude, he seems smart and well-adjusted enough to not crave being a  movie star, even as he’s clearly got the required talent and charisma.  If Ryan Gosling becomes a major star, it’ll be because enough people saw Drive.  His character says the bare minimum, speaking mostly through his actions and as previously noted, his iTunes shuffle.  I’m a Clint Eastwood man.  I respect the hell out of that.  I also read in an interview that one of Gosling’s main sources of inspiration for the role was Prince as “The Kid” in Purple Rain.  That, I don’t just respect.  That, I goddamn adore.  And I can see it!

I’ve also become a huge fan of Bryan Cranston, due to his tremendous work on Breaking Bad, the best drama on American television today, by a long shot.  If you listen to the subtle voice work he does in Drive, as a Valley veteran — so different from New Mexico’s Walter White – you’ll see what a great actor he is.  Cranston has a relatively small role, but a pivotal one:  His character, Shannon, is the more [necessarily] talkative partner to Driver, and the one who humanizes him to Irene in the first place.  He’s also the character, I believe, who starts off the interesting motif in this movie of characters describing how they met each other — Shannon describes how he first met Driver, Standard describes how he first met Irene, Bernie Rose describes how he first met Nino — for a movie that doesn’t overdo it on the dialogue, it sure is telling where they decide to distribute their exposition.

And let’s talk about that pair, Ron Perlman as Nino and Albert Brooks as Bernie.  They’re both playing Brooklyn Jews, and fairly stereotypical ones at that — the wannabe-Italian who runs his operation out of a pizza joint in a San Fernando Valley strip mall, and the movie producer (who sets up a pivotal confrontation at a Chinese restaurant, for Pete’s sake).  Being one of that tribe, I never love to see Jewish bad guys, but these guys are so authentic and so damn fascinating that I’ll allow it.  It helps that they’re badass as all hell.  Perlman is a veteran character actor who can do the monstrous thug thing in his sleep (though I hope he doesn’t, for Mrs. Perlman’s sake), but Brooks is something of a revelation.  He’s scary!  Look at the poster below, where he looks like John C. Reilly’s evil twin.  There’s something great about when comedians play villains in serious movies.  It almost always seems to work.  Why?  That’s a question to ponder for another time, but meanwhile, see this movie and see a truly unique bad-guy performance.

There’s plenty more to admire about Drive, but at a certain point it’s time for me to shut up and insist you see the movie.  Movies like this one demand to be seen theatrically, where you can get lost in the sound and the big picture, and besides, a movie this good deserves your hard-earned shekels.  If you don’t love it on first watch, as some people who have seen it don’t, give it a minute to percolate.  Drive is the kind of movie that is absorbing to watch, but takes on a second life once it seeps into your mind.  It grows in potency the more you think about it.  Kind of like a memory.  Like I said, Drive didn’t actually happen, except it totally happened.

Suggested Reading:

Valhalla Rising.

Purple Rain.

Vanishing Point.

The Stunt Man.

Faster.

Drive Angry.

Fast Five.