Death Proof

"Look, I don't know what futuristic utopia you live in, but the world I live in, a bitch need a gun."

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2007.

My wife is a self-proclaimed post-feminist. This means that she talks about things like "the male gaze" in movies while folding my socks very neatly. She says that Tarantino nails girl-talk, and I believe her. He also subverts genre and creates something new out of what might have been pure exploitation. We move from the celluloid fantasy of girls' asses swinging to jukebox rhythms to the reality of women who carry guns to avoid being raped while doing laundry late at night to women who are indestructible. Call them death proof. Zoe the cat and her infinite lives. Death Proof, a guy once said, is just the kind of movie you enjoy with friends. As I have no better friend than the woman who folds my socks, what can I say but, "This is true."

Ladies, that was fun.

Chungking Express

"Actually, really knowing someone doesn't mean anything. People change. A person may like pineapple today and something else tomorrow."

Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. 1994.

Time, expiration, dreams, and rejuvenation are central themes in Chungking Express. Here, the men are trapped in the past; even though one walks a beat and the other jogs obsessively, they're hopeless layabouts. The girls, however, they're the dreamers; one is enterprising, the other always moving, dancing, looking up. In these sad, funny pairings, Wong suggests it takes at least two people to save just one. This hope, this optimism -- so buoyant here, unlike his other work -- is just one of the reasons he really does live up to the title "most romantic filmmaker in the world." I forget who called him that. Doesn't matter. Good pick for Valentine's Day.

Lars and the Real Girl

"Sometimes I get so lonely I forget what day it is, and how to spell my name."

Written by Nancy Oliver. Directed by Craig Gillespie. 2007.

Small films are great showcases for actors, and Lars and the Real Girl is a small film. It contains no big revelations about the human condition, and its ending isn't unpredictable, just inevitable. For a movie whose central figure is a sex doll named Bianca, this is a surprisingly subtle testament to good people, and to arguably the greatest of the five sensations -- touch.

White Dog

"You got a four-legged time bomb!"

Written by Curtis Hanson and Sam Fuller. Directed by Sam Fuller. 1982

I envy Curtis Hanson, then just a young screenwriter who got to sit in a room with Sam Fuller and "co-write" this script. Fuller's style is usually described as hard-hitting --for reasons literal as well as figurative -- but no one talks much about his tender side. Like Kurosawa he seems noted for one thing, relegated to his own brand of greatness. Cigar-chomping, pistol-packing, etc. There's a great deal of beauty here --imbued with truth -- that might go unseen if you're not watching closely. Hanson lobbied against the window featuring St. Francis, but Fuller knew exactly what he wanted and why he wanted it. That's greatness among directors.

There Will Be Blood

"What's this? Why don't I own this? Why don't I own this?"

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. 2007.

"I have a competition in me," Daniel Plainview says. "I want no one else to succeed." Plainview isn't driven by greed so much as contempt. He sees the worst in people, hates everyone. His soul is the black liquid he hauls up and deposits in the dirt, sometimes shooting skyward, his crooked, wobbly frame the flaming derrick burning long into the night and morning, infinite reserves. There Will Be Blood is a great movie that leaps time a little too quickly in its third act, but it ends at the perfect moment. Plainview's monologue begins the movie with the address, "Ladies and gentlemen...." He ends the movie with, "I'm finished." Appropriate, as it's a movie showcasing not only a single actor -- a titan, a colossus in American movies -- but also a single character. I'll always prefer the internalization of Barry Egan's violence, but this is, next to that, Paul Thomas Anderson's finest movie.

I Shot Jesse James

"Gold is nothing but that last corruption of degenerate man. But to be a little corrupt for the sake of art, that I wouldn't mind."

Written and directed by Sam Fuller. 1949.

"If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes," Sam Fuller said, "throw it in the goddamn garbage." Here's a story that does that, figuratively speaking (though I imagine I'm meant to feel more than that, somehow, when John Ireland washes Reed Hadley's back). Let's say this: I genuinely care about the coward Robert Ford, and I could give a damn about John Kelley the magnanimous marshal --reactions I know the director, in his slap-dash wisdom, hopes of me. Sam Fuller famously fired a Colt .45 into the air to signal the first shot of this, his first movie. Number one with a bullet, you might say. I'm not sure, though, it's all about a girl. Ford's dying confession: "I loved him."

Movie Review: Excalibur

Written by Rospo Pallenberg and John Boorman. Directed by John Boorman. 1981.

"On second thought," the Pythons tell us, "Camelot is a silly place. Let's not go there." To the Pythons I answer: but John Boorman's vision of it is absolutely extraordinary! Like a knight struck by a mace and whirling in circles upon the field, I'm dazzled by the costumes, cinematography, and acting. Performances momentous, among them Nicol Williamson's Merlin and Helen Mirren's Morgana. Yes, there is a goofy, sexed-up vibe to the production, but it's so in-check by the director's steady hand that Excalibur becomes much more than a sword-and-sorcery epic. It's a story of forgiveness set against the backdrop of memory. Simply incredible.

"...it is the doom of men that they forget." -- Merlin

Movie Review: Carnival of Souls

Written by John Clifford. Directed by Herk Harvey. 1962.

The highest compliment I can pay Carnival of Souls is to give it three bananas, that rating reserved for, alternately, the average and the B-picture. Souls is hardly average, but it is the latter, and it revels in its B-ness, so much so that giving it four bananas -- my impulse -- would be a kind of betrayal. But it's startling in its creepiness, in its sexless heroine, in its oftentimes Felliniesque evocation of place and people. Great locations may be all you need for an excuse to tell a story, and Carnival of Souls is nothing if not an ode to such striking, scary places.

"It's funny. The world is so different in the daylight. In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand. But in the daylight everything falls back into place again." -- Mary Henry

Two-Lane Blacktop

"You can never go fast enough."

Written by Rudy Wurlitzer and Will Corry. Directed by Monte Hellman. 1971.

Two-Lane Blacktop is a movie about the greatest of all movie subjects: loneliness -- in particular that sense of isolation that comes with and is symbolized by the changing landscape of the road. These characters "can't get no satisfaction," as the Girl sings to herself, playing pinball in Arkansas. The loneliest of all is Warren Oates as G.T.O., a magnificent and goofy liar whose fabrications are ultimately woven from the lives of the car-freaks he's racing. He tells his fantastic lies to the odd hitchhikers he picks up, one of whom, the Oklahoma Hitchhiker, is "H.D. Stanton." Harry Dean slips his hand onto Oates' knee. "I'm not into that!" Oates barks. "I thought it might help you to relax," H.D. says. The joke, of course, is that nothing will. G.T.O. has no time for momentary satisfaction. He wants the pleasure of beating another man in a race and stealing his girl, the sense of personal triumph that wins him loyalty and love. Possibilities not in the road unspooling behind these characters, but rather in the blacktop still before them. "Those satisfactions," Oates says, "are permanent."

As genuine and complete a vision as I've seen.

Blind Fury

"Well, well, well! Mr. Blind Man, you're positively an incredible human being. You're a walking advertisement for hiring the handicapped!"

Written by Charles Robert Carner. Directed by Phillip Noyce. 1989.

How about this: in the movie's opening scenes, while walking along a Miami roadside, our blind hero encounters an alligator. He taps it with his cane. It growls. "Nice doggy," our hero says and steps lightly over it and continues on his way. The eighties: what a strange and nimble time for the action genre. Rutger Hauer plays his blind swordsman (blinded in Vietnam and taught to "see" again by an entire village) to the hilt. He knows when to dodder and when to slash, and he earns every laugh he gets. Randall "Tex" Cobb and Noble Willingham are hambone-fisted villains, appropriately as flat as Hauer's blade. The screenwriters aren't apologetic for making their bad guys cartoons, nor for letting the kid be a brat, and while it's all very sentimental and goofy in the end, well, it's also pretty darn funny.

Punch-Drunk Love

"I didn't do anything. I'm a nice man. I mind my own business. So you tell me 'that's that' before I beat the hell from you. I have so much strength in me you have no idea. I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine. I would say 'that's that', Mattress Man."

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002.

I believe the best love stories spring from lonely characters, and Barry Egan is as lonely as characters come. His and Lena's walk hand in hand down the hallway of the Princeville Hotel in Hawaii is the sort of scene you crave in movies: the consolidation of two lonely hearts observed discreetly. For much of the movie, we're in Barry's head. Not here. Here, the director knows it's time to step back and watch these wondrous characters from afar, to give them their privacy, and we're oh so happy for them. "Perfect for Romance" is the Princeville's motto. Punch-Drunk Love is perfect for it, too.

The Straight Story

"The worst part of gettin old is rememberin when you was young."

Written by John Roach and Mary Sweeney. Directed by David Lynch. 1999.

The Straight Story opens with the sounds of crickets over a field of stars, and among its first images is a fat woman eating pink cupcakes while sunbathing in her back yard. So despite the witty double entendre of its title, the movie is very much a David Lynch film, playing to the director's great warmth and curious sense of humor. When I first saw it in 2000, I was watching it for the wrong reasons and had no frame of reference for Lynch. Now, I find it poignant, funny, and occasionally preachy. Still, Alvin Straight's ministrations to the folks he encounters on his journey always reveal new facets of his character, not theirs, and the scene in the bar where he and another old man recount their wartime ghosts is as powerful as such scenes get. He recalls the faces of his buddies who never came home, how they've remained young while he's aged.

Monster (1980)

Directed by Kenneth Hartford (as Kenneth Herts). 1980.

Monster is a movie, like Isle of the Snake People, that was made because someone wanted desperately to make it. It's the curious nature of a movie like this that keeps you watching. What compelled the makers, and how ridiculous and hopeful did they feel every single day of the shoot? Even when their hero can't act. Even when their plucky young protagonists aren't worth killing. Even when their rubber star looks silly in the sunlight. How disheartening and wonderful when the climax of your movie involves a dead sheep stuffed with TNT.

Drunken Angel

"Fall in love for someone like me. I may be scruffy but you get free medical care."

Written by Keinosuke Uekusa and Akira Kurosawa. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1948.

"Japanese make too many useless sacrifices," says Shimura's doctor, a criticism of both Mifune's Yakuza thugs who populate the dingy, disease-ridden back-alleys of Tokyo and the militarists who made them -- both the thugs and the alleys. Kurosawa's historic epics, from Seven Samurai to Kagemusha, are his calling cards, but I'll always prefer his noir. His gangsters and drunks swagger and bluster, protesting under the burden of who they are, and it's in their darkest places their humanity shines brightest. Drunken Angel climaxes with a useful sacrifice: Mifune's life for the doctor's. At the movie's end, Shimura buys one of his patients, a seventeen-year-old girl who's survived TB, a sweet, payment on a bet. "Where does one buy sweets?" the old man asks. The girl laughs. "You really don't know anything, do you. At the sweet shop." They stroll off arm in arm and are immediately lost in the marketplace, in a sea of shuffling bodies -- all the more lives the doctor may now save, thanks to a thug.

Gremlins

"Goddamn foreign cars."

Written by Chris Columbus. Directed by Joe Dante. 1984.

"Phone home, caca!" hisses a gremlin as it cuts the phone lines to the Peltzer house. In addition to his executive producer, Joe Dante quotes everyone, from Frank Capra to Don Siegel to George Pal to Red Skelton to Walt Disney to Sylvester Stallone. And on and on and on goes the trivia, my favorite being a cameo by Chuck Jones. Gremlins is a clever, funny movie about man's dogged, noble pursuit of convenience, which ultimately makes monsters of the machines he creates. Who better for a cameo, then, than the man who gave us Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius. Our hearts are in the right places, but our heads -- more often than not thanks to our own Acme rockets -- are up our asses. "Fantastic inventions for a fantastic world," goes Rand Peltzer's wonderful inventor's motto. "I make the illogical logical." What better setting for such a conceit than a movie-set town like Kingston Falls, drawn from the subconscious of old Hollywood -- and at Christmas.