How Killer Nashville Taught My Wife to Fight Crime

In August of 2014, my wife and I attended our first writers' conference together. We went to Killer Nashville, which -- for those of you who don't know it -- is a fantastic conference for crime writers. I went with a manuscript and, eventually, through contacts made at the conference, found my agent. And until today, almost nine months later, the good people at Maria Carvainis and the incomparable Elizabeth Copps were the greatest things to come out of that experience. But today, friends, I learned that Killer Nashville is, in more ways than one, the gift that keeps on giving.

Apparently, it also taught my wife how to fight crime.

First, some background: Crystal and I got married in July of 2008. About a year later, for our first anniversary present, we bought each other Electra bicycles. We opted for Electras because, well, we're grown-ups now, and neither of us had ever owned a truly expensive bike and thought the cost alone might encourage us to keep using them after the first week of euphoric togetherness, those yearned-for spring and summer afternoons spent pedaling past fields of blooming flowers. Not the greatest logic, to be sure, but there were other, sounder ideas at play, too: the craftsmanship, the engineering, the idea of something that would endure. We bought cruiser models, the kind you might take to the beach and poke around on leisurely. (According to the logos emblazoned on the sides, their design features "patented flatfoot technology"; to be perfectly honest, I still don't know what this means).

I'd like to tell you that we kept riding them and riding them and that every glorious sunset here in Georgia ended with our biking silhouettes tall against it, but that wouldn't be the truth. In fact, we rode them for about six months, semi-regularly, then put them in the shed and forgot about them for a while.

This past May, feeling guilty and wistful and in need of some good, heart-pumping exercise, we took them out and brought them into the shop for repairs and tune-ups, and we began riding them to the college campus where we work, about a mile from our house, to feed a stray cat that lives under my office building. In the evenings, we returned and left them unchained on our carport, hidden by our parked cars. We live in a small town, and while small-town life doesn't always suit us, it does carry with it the distinct advantage of letting out slack when it comes to trust. Alas, about a week ago, during the day, when both cars were gone from the carport on separate errands and the bikes were left exposed, that slack pulled taught, and someone crept onto our property in broad daylight and stole my black Electra.

We did our due diligence as citizens: we made the police report and thanked the officer, thinking to ourselves that the bike was lost forever. We felt victimized. We felt responsible. After all, by leaving the bike unchained, hadn't I supplied the criminal with opportunity? We talked about the possibility of whether the thief would be foolish enough to ride it around the neighborhood, whether we'd see it ditched along the roadside, whether it was already in a truck somewhere driving away. Anyway, we went on with the business and pleasure of our lives.

Today, at work, I got a call from my wife. "I've called the police," Crystal said. "I saw a guy riding your bike. I've followed him into an apartment complex. I'm going to hang back, but the cops are on their way."

Oh, friends. How to describe, now, the latent thrill of your wife tailing a thief? Or recovering your stolen property like Wonder Woman? I won't even try here.

Instead, this: at Killer Nashville last August, Crystal and I both attended a seminar by a female private investigator. She covered surveillance equipment and surveillance techniques. Among her advice: "Hang back and fly casual." When Crystal spotted the man on my bike, pedaling down the street toward the apartment complex, she did just that. She was driving her Kia on an errand to Walgreens. She turned after him, remembering what the P.I. in Nashville had said and keeping her distance, all the while forming a description of him for the police, anticipating the inevitable moment when he would run. And run, he did. But the details were fixed by then: white sport shirt, shorts, sandals over socks, a beard. A man not necessarily young, but dressing young. A quick process that played out in her head, one picked up in a seminar meant for fiction.

The time was 10 a.m. Crystal waited on the cops, they got there, and she and I texted details for about fifteen minutes after that. She sent word that the officers had found the bike, but the guy riding it was gone. So I drove to the complex to collect the bike. It was mine, for sure, scratched and muddy. Crystal was beaming, and the cops had nothing but praise for her actions. Quick-thinking. Eagle eyes. Good judgment in hanging back.

We were late for a veterinary appointment by then, and when we walked into the doctor's office, carrier in hand, Crystal apologized. "I'm sorry we're late," she said. "I was fighting crime." And it was my turn to beam.

Disclaimer: If you witness a crime occurring, do not assume a writer's conference has taught you to fight it. Use good judgment, as any writer would.

Batman and Me: On Tim Burton's BATMAN Turning 25

Tim Burton's Batman came along the summer I turned eleven and awoke my creative soul.

Looking back, of course, it also introduced me to consumerism, just as Star Wars had done for the first wave of my generation only ten years prior: I bought lobby cards, comic books, a novelization of the script, posters, action figures, rubber masks, rubber gauntlets. I had the breakfast cereal. The Batwing. The Batmobile. Bob the Goon. I asked Mom to order a copy of the Warner Bros. catalogue and checked off three pages of merchandise for Christmas that year. Pins. Playing cards. A laugh-box that, to my great disappointment, looked nothing like the Joker's in the movie. Mom also made me a homemade costume out of a gray sweatsuit, black fabric, and cardboard (for the ears). There's a picture of that somewhere, God help me. And, to this day, I still have a wooden fridge magnet I made myself at my grandmother's house with the bat-logo painted in acrylic. I was swept up in the rising tide of what the media called "Batmania." These days, we just call it fandom, which is, by turns, one of the great social movements of the twenty-first century or, more or less, a correct term for a marketing demographic.

Batman the movie brought with it a resurgence in the character's popularity. He was in demand, and he wasn't just for kids anymore. He was dark, he was brooding. He was Gothic. He was, in essence, Frank Miller's nightmarish vigilante, a hero of the modern psyche. I remember the first time I saw the leather-bound collection of Miller's Batman stories on display in the window of a Waldenbooks in 1988: The Complete Frank Miller Batman. Before this moment, as a kid, I had not paid much attention to anything called a "graphic novel." I doubt I even knew what a graphic novel was back then, but here was a beautiful, black, adult-looking thing with pages trimmed in silver, and when I priced one, I was thrilled. Sixty dollars! Serious stuff. Had I ever paid sixty dollars for anything at that point in my life? Moments later, I overhead two twenty-somethings talking about how great the book looked on their shelves at home, and that, I suppose, was how my epic Christmas list started. I couldn't pick the book up and flip through it because it was shrink-wrapped, and so the mystery of what lay inside was a tantalizing one. The reveal when I finally opened my copy was nothing short of a revelation: The Dark Knight Returns. Thirteen years later, I would place this book a reading list of influential fiction for my creative writing comps at Ole Miss. It was a book that taught me to take the fantastic seriously, to see the world not as a child sees it but as an adult, to look beyond the surface of a symbol and see the myriad complexities and contradictions at work within. I devoured it, read it and re-read it so many times the spine began to crack. There were other books that came along, among them Bob Kane's somewhat questionable autobiography Batman and Me, a book less interested in truth-telling, you might say, than myth-spinning. But it was filled with full-color panels of original 1930s storylines, and at the time, those weren't so easy to come by.

I began to draw around this time, too, at first just reproducing the character's various poses in the artwork that permeated the culture. Eventually, once my parents started paying for lessons, I came to art for its own sake, not to create color-pastel reproductions of Jack Nicholson's eyebrows and hairline but to make art as a fundamental expression of my own inner life. I never came to enjoy sketching as deeply as writing, which had come a few years earlier for me, but I did understand the connection between the two, the visual and the written: after all, Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren and Frank Miller had also written their stories. So Tim Burton's Batman goes deep, I suppose, the whole phenomenon surrounding it, as well as the thrill of the film itself. Every year, as more and more Marvel movies come out, each more bombastic and labyrinthine than the last, each so determined to say something but clueless about what that something is, Batman grows more refined, more artful. Its chief pleasure stems from its timeless, mythic qualities: the city in decay, order out of chaos, the orphan hero. And beyond the superficial trappings of the merchandise I amassed and eventually lost or sold in so many garage sales, beyond its place as a touchstone of my childhood, it's a flashpoint of creativity: the moment when I understood the difference between standing on the outside of a display window looking in and wanting to make art for myself.

A version of this post originally appeared via The Banana Tree of Jean Louis in 2014.

"The Film is a Poem..."

The first line of Roger Ebert's autobiography, Life Itself, is the kind of opening line most writers wish they had written: "I was born inside the movie of my life." It's an elegant, humble start to the story of a writer who became the only movie critic to ever win the Pulitzer prize. The only movie critic, it is said, that many people ever read. Well, for the sake of movie critics everywhere—and here I think Roger Ebert would agree with me—I hope that's not true.

Ebert left behind a lifelong career of loving movies, a body of written work unparalleled, save maybe in the works of the great Pauline Kael, a body of work he planned to continue building even as his own body was failing him. I knew him through his writing, and I found his prose always to be warm, witty, and eloquent, even when he was being downright acerbic. His criticism I sometimes liked less, as he occasionally got his facts wrong, misremembering or misquoting. Still, he always had an eye for the loving details, as in his review of Star Wars, where he notes Luke's landspeeder reminds him "uncannily of a 1965 Mustang."

A decade ago, when I began watching movies in earnest—which only means, with aspirations to write about how and why they move me—I usually disagreed with Ebert's overly generous, three- and four-star reviews of popular American films. His reviews of the great movies, though, I absorbed, so conversational and approachable was his style. As the years have gone by, I've mellowed in my own conversations, gotten more approachable myself when it comes to movies, and I see his work now in a different light. He was that rare and gifted writer who bridges the gap between his subject (cinema) and his readers (everyone). No small feat in a nation that still holds little respect for movies as art.

Tonight I watched McCabe & Mrs. Miller, one of the greatest movies ever made about longing, isolation, love and loneliness. Ebert wrote this about it, in one of his finest reviews: "It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Some spend their lives trying, but always fall short. Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller. This is one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come—not for McCabe, not with Mrs. Miller, not in the town of Presbyterian Church, which cowers under a gray sky always heavy with rain or snow. The film is a poem—an elegy for the dead."

It's a fitting kind of mourning, I think, to revisit this movie tonight. Ebert has been an undeniable influence upon this blog, just as another writer I once knew, Barry Hannah, was of immeasurable influence upon my fiction. I once thought Warren Beatty's achingly beautiful line—"I got poetry in me!"—might have been attributed to Barry, who spent some time in Hollywood in the seventies and worked with Robert Altman doctoring scripts. A friend chased that theory down and, straight from Barry's mouth, debunked it. But it's still the kind of line Barry would have written, probably wished he had, when he thought about it. And so McCabe & Mrs. Miller has always held a special place in my heart as the movie that reminds me of a writer who taught me, who teaches me still. Now, I guess, two such writers owe the film a debt.

In Life Itself, speaking of his own death, Ebert says, "What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins's theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, cliches that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting, and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes."

That list of memes seems like a thing McCabe might rattle off to himself, mumbling his heart out before a mirror, putting bullets in his pistol. Unlike McCabe, Ebert will be remembered for a much longer while, and he never mumbled.

A version of this post originally appeared via The Banana Tree of Jean Louis in 2013.

Gone, Baby. Gone.

In March 2010, I was having dinner at a Mexican restaurant with a handful of other teachers and the writer Judith Ortiz Cofer. Cofer was the visiting dignitary to the two-year college where I work here in small-town Georgia, and six or seven of us had taken her to the only joint in town with decent grub. Over the chips and salsa, Cofer was lamenting the gone-baby-gone days of the "bad boys" of the trade — writers like James Dickey who, when hired to read on a university campus, would end up drunkenly serenading the college President's fifteen-year-old daughter at five in the morning from the lawn beneath her bedroom window. Those were the days, Cofer said, when writers were dangerous.

Well.

I don’t know about that.

But I do know that Barry Hannah is often remembered as being of those days, and so when the conversation inevitably turned to his legendary gun and trumpet, I couldn’t help smiling.  The truth was I, now a teacher of the trade and a struggler at the craft, had not known a dangerous man. In fact, I had learned to write at the feet of a man who, when he smiled, resembled nothing so much as someone’s sweet grandmother. A grandmother, sure, who wore leather and rode a motorcycle down the back-roads of rural Mississippi. A grandmother, sure, who professed a deep admiration for the intricate mechanisms of firearms.

But dangerous?

There was nothing dangerous about the man I saw in Walmart in 2006 on a snowy night in Oxford, Mississippi, wearing a woman’s scarf and gray sweat pants and pawing through the five-dollar bin of DVDs, looking, like me, I guess, for something special to watch on a cold winter’s evening.

In the 2004 winter issue of The Paris Review, Barry Hannah tells interviewer Lacey Galbraith about the incident in Alabama that became infamous, how he once brought an empty pistol into a workshop and “twirled the chambers to explain six movements in a short story.” This had been a lifetime ago, a drunken mistake that became the specters of things Barry had done only vaguely, haunting him into old age. In the interview, Lacey kids him as to whether he remembers what the six movements were. “No,” he tells her. “I could make something up, but it would be untrue….”

In the wake of his death, one or two writers out there have attempted to canonize Barry’s apocryphal past. If you’re like me, you’ve probably read a few of these in search of something honest.  One of the worst pieces I read was by a New Orleans writer. He paints a picture of a shit-faced but ambitious skirt chaser casting a fly rod from a balcony on Decatur Street. All things the writer of the piece didn’t witness, mind you, because he was too much of a ninny to drop by his buddy’s party and actually meet Hannah. The piece celebrates the writer’s cowardice. It’s a strange, mealy kind of tribute, one I’d wager Barry would have been baffled by. Secondhand tales set down as first-person remembrances, all done in the spirit of love.  Odd.

Barry always spoke of his past in interviews as a joyous, messy time, stopping well shy of naming regrets. By the time I knew him, though, his bad-boy days — the booze, the carousing, the guns and trumpets — had become as central to his life and writing as his forgotten six movements. Instead, he’d tell you it was a vision of Christ that had begun to inform his life and work, a deeply tanned man standing quietly at his sickbed. “I haven’t paid you enough attention,” Barry told him.

Dangerous?

No.

Kind. Generous.

Considerate.

At a party I attended my first year in the program, Barry’s wife Susan — gone, as well, now — found me hugging a wall and suggested I “quiet down.” Moments later I shared my first words with Barry, who sat in a chair in a corner, drinking a Red Bull. I learned he, like me, didn't care for these academic shindigs. My God, though, how many of them he must have gone to in his life, and this was only my first. I loved him immediately, if only because his soul seemed that of a quiet, thoughtful man’s who’d rather be home reading with a dog at his socked feet. So that’s pretty much what I did when it came to parties for the next three years: stayed home.  Barry went, of course. In truth, he carried the mantle of writing god with immeasurable grace in Oxford, a place at once expert and ignorant of men like Barry Hannah. They love their mythic drunken writers so in Oxford, toast them with champagne and without irony when they’re over a decade sober. It’s no secret that Barry sometimes chafed at that love, likening Oxford, as he put it, to a kind of “theme park for writers,” more enamored with myth than truth. If he was dangerous, he was dangerous only to everyone’s idea of themselves. He walked taller than the pretenders, and there were a lot of pretenders in Oxford.

Anyway, now that Barry’s gone, I hope the legends unspool until there’s nothing left to hold them together, and the only thing that remains is this: he lived, he wrote, he taught, he loved, he died; he did all of these with grace and as much dignity as they required.

Someone somewhere, I know, remembers James Dickey sitting quietly in a room, feeling old and thoughtful. But where’s the fun in telling that story? It’s not even a story, not by the standards of Barry’s fiction. No beginning, no end, just interminable middle. No thrill. No danger.

Just an old man looking for a good story cheap on a cold night.

I guess I could make something up, but it would be untrue.

This essay was originally published alongside a number of others from Barry's students in a special issue of Drunken Boat.

Because Andy Likes Puppets

One Friday in September of 2010, Crystal and I went to The Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. The trip began with an email to me, forwarded from Crystal, the subject line reading: "Because Andy Likes Puppets...."

It's true: I do like puppets.  In fact, I adore them.  My mascot for another blog I used to keep was a puppet. A chimpanzee. His name is Jean Louis, and I've had him since childhood, but he hasn't always been Jean Louis. He used to be George. He became Jean Louis in graduate school at Ole Miss, when my sense of irony and existential angst was sharpest. Now, I tend to think of him as JL. Something else you may not know:  JL enjoyed a brief run in pictures in the early part of this decade, most them directed by and co-starring me (no, you'll never see them; no one will, save those who knew me then, and with any luck they'll keep their secrets). In my favorite of these, JL was a homicidal phantom tormenting a lonely guy struggling to sell his novel (those first few years after earning the MFA were hard, creatively).

Of course, none of this has anything to do with Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which was the reason for our trip to the Center for Puppetry Arts that Friday. In the email Crystal sent me, the Center was advertising a 7 p.m. event:  "Mr. McFeely Remembers: A Tribute to Fred Rogers." Tickets were ten dollars. In my mind, this constituted what one sometimes refers to as "a once-in-a-lifetime-event," the opportunity to hear the Speedy Deliveryman from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood talk about what it was like to work with a man widely recognized as the greatest television "communicator" in the history of the medium. Also, it was a chance to see part of my childhood -- part of all of our childhoods -- in person. Nothing short of momentous, of course.

We arrived at the center early to wander through the museum, which is essentially a shrine to Jim Henson's Muppets and the art of puppetry throughout the ages. The parking lot was empty, save a white Toyota pickup driven by a round little man who pulled in shortly after we did. We sat in the car for a moment, wondering if we were in the right place, so deserted was the lot. The man in the pickup sat there, too. Crystal joked it might be Mr. McFeely. After all, wouldn't a speedy deliveryman be early? We got out, went in, and, once told that the theater would open in about an hour, were admitted to the museum.

We were standing just inside the entrance, reading something on the wall about the history of puppetry, when the man from the Toyota walked in behind us. I heard the girl at the desk greet him, saying, "We're so glad you're here!"

"Hello," the man said, and the sound of his voice was like the opening of a door to a place deep inside me. He might as well have said:  "Speedy delivery!"

The white Toyota. It was him. I froze. I let him pass, and then I whispered to Crystal: "That was him!"

How to explain what I meant.  It wasn't awe or admiration for David Newell, the actor, who had walked by. I've never understood celebrity worship, especially minor celebrities of the TV or local radio station variety. What I felt pass me in the corridor there in a museum dedicated to the wonder of puppetry was not him the guy who played Mr. McFeely, but him the friendly and benevolent ghost of childhood past.

We wandered on through the exhibits of Fraggles and Muppets, each new corner surprising and delighting with original puppets from Labyrinth, Sesame Street, and The Muppet Show (the frayed stitching of Rowlf the Dog, Ernie in his glass case, somehow lonely without Bert).

The auditorium upstairs opened and began to fill. We took our seats. We waited. The air in the room charged. Two women several rows back had puppets out, little green homemade monsters that seemed every bit as lively and happy to be here as we. 7:00 came. Then 7:05.  Crystal and I made nervous jokes: Mr. McFeely was backstage, snorting mounds of cocaine, a bottle of bourbon being pried from his hand. Around six or seven after, the Center spokesperson took the stage and introduced David Newell, who mysteriously had not yet appeared. And then, of course, one of the doors to the auditorium opened down front and we all heard, "Speedy delivery!" and in darted Mr. McFeely in cap and uniform. It was cute, sure, but it also warmly undercut any last drops of irony that might have been hanging in the little black raincloud of adulthood above us.

What followed was a two-hour presentation in which it became apparent that Fred Rogers was, in fact, a saint of television. I was alternately delighted and moved, especially by the puppets, on which Newell chose to focus a great deal of his presentation, appropriately enough given the venue. Rogers did most of his own puppetry, as well as the voices, turns out. In the Q&A that followed, people asked oddly geeky questions about particular episodes, some of which I thought missed the point of everything we'd seen. Even Newell seemed a little surprised by the precision of one or two questions regarding a purple dancing bear or some such thing, but he was gracious and generous with his time and love.

I was oddly touched by the couple sitting in front of us. Probably our age, the man had obviously grown up -- like we all had -- with Mister Rogers, but he had perhaps grown sideways with him, as well. Newell showed excerpts from the show, and the guy in front of us would elbow his girl before a clip or an outtake like a kid gearing up for his favorite scene in a movie. Daniel Tiger sings about being a mistake:  here it comes, here it comes!

It reminded me of how, one aimless year between college and graduate school, when I had lived at home with my parents and taken night classes at a school fifty miles away following my first break-up with a girl, I had spent the days having lunch with Mister Rogers on PBS. I had found him again at a time in my life when I needed a certain kind of comfort, the affirmation that someone somewhere liked me just the way I was.

JL sits quietly on my shelf in my office now. Has sat quietly for almost seven years. Every now and then, when I'm blue about life, creativity, writing, art, I think he may come out and make one last impromptu appearance. Like Sir Didymus and his friends, I guess, he's there when I need him. It's comforting: how the ghosts of childhood are ever with us. Sometimes we meet them in the flesh. Sometimes we animate them ourselves. Either way, what wondrous friends they are.

A version of this post originally appeared via The Banana Tree of Jean Louis in 2010.

"Shark!" - Thoughts on JAWS Turning 35

"Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah, then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin and the hollerin they all come in and rip you to pieces."

Written by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. From the novel by Peter Benchley. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 1975.

In the first ten minutes of JAWS, Mayor Vaughn strong-arms Chief Brody into keeping mum about a girl killed by "probable shark attack" in the waters off Amity Island. His oily reasoning runs so: "You yell barracuda, everybody says, 'Huh, what?' You yell shark...and we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."

Lately, when I've told people that JAWS is -- and has always been -- my favorite movie, I've felt a lot like the guy yelling 'barracuda.' "Really?" people say, and cock their heads. "Huh." My wife tells me it's because people don't remember how good it is. They remember the movie, sure: the mechanical shark that sank to the ocean floor when the crew submerged it for the first time, the sharp decline in beach attendance in the summer of 1975, the famous line Brody utters upon first seeing the title character (everyone say it with me: "You're gonna need a bigger boat"). Lost in the fog of too few screenings, however, is what everyone's forgotten: like The Godfather or Star Wars or Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, JAWS remains one of the greatest of American movies.

I should point out how I intend the word "great" here: in the truest sense of the word, as in larger than others of its kind, remarkable, and important. Crystal and I were fortunate enough to happen upon a 35th anniversary screening at the Fox theater in Atlanta this past weekend. I'd never seen a theatrical print of the film before, so I suspected that to sit in the dark for two hours and see it projected wide and grainy and larger-than-life would be an experience akin to epiphany. It didn't disappoint.

Films like JAWS -- and there are so very few, perhaps not even one, when it comes down to it -- demand theatrical viewing if only because their scope cannot be contained. Spielberg utilizes a wide screen to its fullest potential, with foreground and background elements occupying extreme positions for maximum emotional effect: the chief's point-of-view shot past the head of a pestering city councilman, for example, his eyes -- and our eyes -- on a girl screaming in the water. Disparate images, the gulf between them emphasizing Brody's disconnection from the more mundane aspects of his job (why does a police chief have to get drunk and rail about the pressures of being a cop in crime-ridden New York when the simple political spaces one has to negotiate in small-town life seem so much less dangerous?). Nuances abound in this very large movie.

Something else: JAWS, like Star Wars, is a product of its director's youth and audacity. Spielberg hasn't really made great movies since the eighties. When asked by a college student whether studio support by way of millions of dollars in cash to fund his pictures might have hampered his artistic development, the late great Orson Welles famously replied: "No." Maybe that was true for Orson, a director who was never really less than successful even in abject failure. But for Spielberg the hunger kept him moving, much like the titular shark; sharks sink if they stop. Spielberg stopped being hungry sometime after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, his (and Lucas's) last movie born out of discontent, restlessness, and urgency.

I think I love JAWS most because it's virtually every arch-story the screen can hold: a stranger in a strange land ("Martin sits in his car on the ferry to the mainland..."), the ties of love and family ("Give us a kiss...because I need it"), a tale of friendship ("Why don't we have one more drink and sit down and cut that shark open?"), and a tale of pirates ("I'll never put on a life jacket again..."). It exploits the primal terror that lurks in all of us and somehow buoys the child in each of us.

I first saw the movie on television when I was six. There was a time -- I don't know if it's still the case, as I haven't subscribed to TV in almost a decade now -- when TBS ran JAWS once or twice a year. I recorded it and wore the tape out re-watching it. It wasn't until high school that I got my hands on the unedited film and saw, for the first time, a man's severed leg sinking to the bottom of the estuary, knotty and blossoming red. What violence it lacked the TV version famously made up for with scenes not in the theatrical release, like a little eccentricity of character, which serves to endear Quint (or is it to depict him as the madman he is?): he torments a young boy playing clarinet in a store.

JAWS is also a great movie, of course, because of what it did for the summer release schedule and the box office. Some might argue in this age of Michael Bay, well, that's no great legacy, but that would be unfair. Besides, in JAWS there is no blame to assign, only praise and fond memories. Cinematically speaking, it's a technical marvel and a milestone, a revolutionary work. A tough movie to make, and whenever I hear Spielberg weigh the challenges of making JAWS against the rewards -- "When I think of JAWS, I think of courage and stupidity," he has said -- I can't help feeling a surge of optimism regarding the infinite possibilities of popcorn movies.

JAWS is a great movie because it made me, a kid who hadn't seen very many movies yet, fall in love with the art form for reasons I couldn't articulate at six. I could only sit in front of the TV and gasp. It occurred to me, between similar gasps last weekend in the Fox, that had I been born a decade earlier, had I seen JAWS on the silver screen in the summer of 1975, my life might have turned out very differently. I might have been living in Hollywood today, trying my damnedest to direct movies. I like to think, though, that in the more intimate setting of my living room floor in 1984, from the moment the great white broke the water (and Quint's boat), I would forever be making movies -- and crying "Shark!" -- in my heart.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

"Stealing a man's wife, that's nothing, but stealing a man's car, that's larceny."

Written by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch. Directed by Tay Garnett.

It's old, moralistic Hollywood that comes to Frank Chambers' rescue, that sets Cora Smith's soul free out in the ocean. The screenwriters believe a confession before a priest and a late-night swim are preferable to darker, nihilistic ends for Frank and Cora, and this generosity of spirit springs from the absolute necessity for justice to be served. But get this: it's not the murderers but the Law who really comes off badly here, those supposed guardians of justice who in fact joke and gamble in the presence of a blind lady. In the end, justice may be served, but it's dirty lawyers who administer it! Ah, I love old Hollywood for just this: the moralistic restraint it imposed and the social (and moral) subterfuge that restraint inspired.

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