I've been wanting to reactivate this mostly defunct blog for awhile, and I've been trying to find a way to A)write something new every day and B)write something other than scripts, treatments and Facebook status updates. This seemed like as good a reason to start as any.
This isn't exactly my "50 Favorite Movies" list, although I will tell you in advance that the top 10 pretty much fell out that way. I gave myself a couple limitations -- the big one being only one film per director. If I hadn't done that, at least 20 out of the 50 would have been dominated by Scorsese, the Coens and David Lynch. Also, I decided to pick movies not necessarily based on whether they represent a filmmaker's BEST work, per say, but rather on what each individual movie meant to me when I first saw it. This first entry is a great example of that.
I'm also going to try to keep each entry fairly short.
Anyway. Enough caveats. Here I go.
#50: "Chasing Amy" (Kevin Smith)
I'm generally not a big Kevin Smith fan, but I felt like I had to include him somewhere on this list because of the effect his films had on my decision to ultimately go back to school and pursue my career as a filmmaker. It's easy to forget in this era of Millenials and Smith's "Cop Out" the seismic effect that Smith had on the indie film landscape back in 1994 with "Clerks". For a minute there, he really was the Kurt Cobain of dick and boob jokes, and his View Askew movies really were the cinematic voice of Generation X.
So it was tempting to go with "Clerks" because, whereas Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters" (later on this list) was the first film I remember seeing that made me WANT to make movies, "Clerks" was the first film I saw that made me think I COULD make movies. It was lo-fi, rowdy and punk rock in a way that appealed to 16-year-old me in the same way I'm sure The Stooges appealed to Joey and Johnny Ramone back in the early 70s.
But, if I'm to be honest, "Chasing Amy" is really the only movie of Smith's that I still love. It has been roundly knocked for being a puerile male wish-fulfillment fantasy, and I'm sure that when I saw it as a naive and still girlfriendless college freshman, that's probably the level I appreciated it on. But, nearly two decades and more than a few broken relationships later, I can look back on this movie and see that Smith, in his kind of gregariously dumb way, managed to put his finger on some essential truths about me and other young men of my generation.
Rather than just giving us the wish fulfillment myth (man convinces lesbian to stop being lesbian and fall in love with him), Smith rather deftly tears it apart. This isn't a simple story about Holden and Alyssa falling in love. This is about the sudden and confusing fluidity of sexual mores and expectations that arose in the post 80s generation. What did it mean to be a straight man or a gay woman in the 1990s? Nobody really knew. It's something David Fincher got at a couple years later in a much more vicious, male-centric way with "Fight Club," but I think there's a real resonance between Holden and Banky and that film's Tyler and Jack.
And, let's not forget (SPOILER ALERT) that Alyssa and Holden don't ride off into the sunset together. That bummed me out at the time, but in retrospect there was just no way that thing was going to last.
Smith never really got this close to greatness again, and these days I don't have a lot of use for him. But I still throw this one in the DVD player every couple years or so, and I find it's sweetened rather nicely with age.
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