50 Days 50 Films - #23 "Chinatown" (Roman Polanski)

Film noir is one of those genres — like the Western — that's just hard to approach earnestly. Since its heydey in the 1940s, the tendency has been to postmodernize it, to infuse it with irony and a healthy dose of wink-wink self reference. The stoic, even staid conventions of the genre are turned in on themselves and used to deconstruct rather than celebrate. Most modern noirs are comments on the whole notion of noir, rather than fully fleshed out noirs in their own right. Some of these are great films, but ultimately they rely on our knowledge of and, to a degree, skepticism about the genre . We have noirs that are told backwards ("Memento"), noirs played for comedy ("The Big Lebowski"), even noirs set in high schools ("Brick").

What we don't tend to have anymore are simple, classic noirs that are, at heart, good stories told well.

This is why Polanski's almost religiously classicist approach in 1974's "Chinatown" is such a breath of fresh air. Certainly, it's a product of its era and the New Hollywood in many ways, and one could argue that the casting of John Huston — director of such classic noirs as "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950) — as central villain Noah Cross is a postmodern nod to the genre's past. But the fact is Huston is simply GREAT in the role — oily and evil and seductive in a way that is almost primally repellant — that whatever film-cineaste baggage we bring to the performance quickly falls away.

Everyone is great in this. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway have never been better, either before or since.

"Chinatown" was penned by Robert Towne ("The Last Detail," "Shampoo"), one of the all-time screenwriting greats, and this film still stands as his masterpiece. Famously, he clashed with Polanski over the film's vision, but somehow that tension managed to distill what has been acknowledged as Towne's unwieldy tome (rumored at one point to be nearly 300 pages long) into a lean, mean, frighteningly nasty piece of work.

I don't have a lot more to say about it, because we all know how great it is. So I'll just leave it with this quote from Roger Ebert's review:

"Godard once said that the only way to review a movie is to make another movie, and maybe that’s what Polanski has done here. He’s made a perceptive, loving comment on a kind of movie and a time in the nation’s history that are both long past. 'Chinatown' is almost a lesson on how to experience this kind of movie."

50 Days 50 Films - #24 "The Signal" (David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry, and Dan Bush)

I experienced an emotionally complicated breakup with horror movies somewhere around 2003. It was like being married to someone for twenty years and waking up one morning, looking at her snoring in the bed next to you, and realizing that you've simply grown apart. There's no infidelity there, no betrayal. You still care for this woman, in a way, but you realize that you just want different things.

You love her, but you're not in love with her, if you know what I mean.

It took me another couple years to really come to terms with this feeling, but by 2006 or so I felt like I had solidly moved on with my life. Horror films were a part of my past, but they no longer defined me. I had essentially stopped writing horror scripts and had moved on to gangster movies, dark dramas, and thrillers. I felt good. I felt comfortable with this new, hot young girlfriend.

Then came the "The Signal."

Suddenly, here was a movie that encompassed everything I felt an indie horror movie with its own unique vision could be — but too often isn't. It's creative, energetic, completely insane, and very very scary.

It was like running into said ex-wife in a grocery store two years after the divorce and realizing she's lost a bunch of weight and has been working out, and you find yourself wondering why you ever left her in the first place.

"The Signal" is the brainchild of three Atlanta-based filmmakers (Bruckner, Gentry and Bush) with about $50K in their pocket and no one looking over their shoulder and telling them what NOT to do. The story of what would happen if a sudden, mysterious signal coming through televisions and cell phones were to push everyone into a murderous frenzy (like Stephen King's "Cell," but a lot better), the movie is divided into three interlocking parts. Each filmmaker switches off writing, directing and cinematographical duties.

The result is a film that feels at once tightly disciplined and wildly out of control in the best way possible. Each section completely stands on its own as its own short film, with its own voice and vision, and yet together they create a whole that is unlike anything I've ever seen before or since.

This is NOT a zombie movie, by the way. It feels like a direct response to the zombie wave. There are no murderous automatons — Each person afflicted by the signal develops his or her own interior logic for why they begin doing the horrible things they find themselves doing. The filmmakers put you inside the experience of insanity and spin you in circles until you simply don't know which way is up anymore. This is is what makes the movie so disturbing (and, indeed, often quite funny).

"Let The Right One In" dropped into a theaters a few months later, and it felt like horror movies were experiencing a much needed resurgence. I was in love all over again. Unfortunately, these films turned out to be anomalies, and I can't say the genre has completely rehabilitated itself. There's still way too much garbage for me to really consider myself the fan I once was.

But if I can get a movie this fresh and alive once every two or three years, I'll count myself lucky.

50 Days 50 Films - #25 "Candyman" (Bernard Rose)

Another pretty great horror movie whose memory has been sullied over the years by a run of tepid direct-to-video sequels.

But go back and watch the original. Watch it at night. Alone. With the lights off.

And then tell me with a straight face it didn't get under your skin.

I don't suppose I have a lot to say about this film, other than that it just works. It's smart and atmospheric, sports some really great visuals, and has an almost arthouse sensibility to the way it unfolds its narrative.

It's also really scary.

Scary in a brooding, creak-of-the-floorboards-in-the-night sort of way.

Scary (when it needs to be) in a HOLY-FUCKING-SHIT-DID-YOU-SEE-THAT!!!! sort of way.

It features one of my favorite character actors, Xander Berkely, playing a classic Xander Berkely shithead.

It has a score by Philip Glass that pretty much blows every other horror-movie score since "Halloween" right out of the water. 

It has a kid in it whose real name is, I shit you not, DeJuan Guy.

It's also the rare studio horror movie that has a few things to say — about race and class, about the insular nature of academia, and about modern folk mythology.

And it all comes together in this almost perfect little package of a really spooky little film. This movie should have been a gamechanger for 1990s horror. Unfortunately, we went down the meta-"Scream"-irony-for-the-sake-of-nothing path instead and somehow found ourselves lost in the Death Valley of torture porn a few years later. Oh well.

50 Days 50 Films - #26 "Stand By Me" (Rob Reiner)

In putting together this list, it has become more and more clear to me that I could never really be professional film critic. I just don't have the required sense of objectivity, the ability to take myself out of the story and evaluate a film fundamentally on its own merits. Even the admittedly "great" films I'm discussing here — James Whale's "Frankenstein," Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain, etc. — are things I view primarily through the lens of my own experience. I can appreciate "Frankenstein" for its rightful place in cinematic history and for the ways in which Whale used German Expressionism to help redefine and push forward the tropes of Hollywood cinema. That's all there. But, fundamentally, I just love monsters.

Even yesterday's film, "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," is something I cannot separate from my experience growing up in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Is it the best Kubrick film? Who the hell knows? It's the best for me. And in the end that's all I really care about.

Which brings me to Rob Reiner's 1986 classic, "Stand By Me."

I know I mention Stephen King probably way too much on this blog, but I can't overstate the seismic effect he had on me when I was 12 or 13. He was the first guy I read who made me believe I could do it, too.

But before I ever read a single word that he committed to the page, there was "Stand By Me." Based on King's superlative novella "The Body" from his 1982 collection "Different Seasons," Reiner's film is a truly wonderful meditation on childhood, growing up, life, death, blah blah blah.

Fuck all that.

This movie is about me.

I don't mean that I relate to it, or that I see shades of myself in it. I mean it is about me. 

Like, specifically, ME.

I am Gordie Lachance.

I first saw the movie maybe a year or so after it was released, and I was left dumbstruck by it. The parallels between Gordie (Wil Wheaton) and me completely freaked me out. I, too, was an oversensitive budding writer (10 or 11 when I saw the movie, which put me right around the same age as him). I, too, was gripped by an imagination that, at times, almost scared me with its sheer vividness. I, too, had a somewhat distant older brother (mine wasn't dead, just 12 years older than me and off doing his own thing). I, too, grew up in a small mountain town, where the woods behind my house became an entire world unto itself, within which my friends and I were able to explore, transform, and rule as kings.

And I, too, had a friend like River Phoenix's Chris Chambers — the brooding tough kid to my sensitive inner poet, with whom I shared an intractable, at times overpowering bond (although, in truth, Chris was the friend I wish I had — mine was a bit more Ace Merrill than I would have liked to admit at the time).

I have no doubt that if we had heard about some dead kid in the woods, we would have gone looking for him, too.

But more than the particulars (and, to be sure, there are differences — not the least of which is the not-dead brother and the fact that I am a child of the 80s rather than the 50s), I saw the world the way Gordie saw it. His filter was my filter. He was weird the way I was weird. He was sad the way I was sad.

It wasn't until three or four years later that I read the novella, and again I was gripped by that sense of almost vertigo and deja vu. I was just old enough at that point to respond to King's darker vision of childhood — equal parts nostalgic and acidic. And I saw even more of myself in King's Gordie than I did in Reiner's. King spends a great deal of time exploring the writer's side of Gordie's brain, showing us how he interprets the events of his life and then repurposes them into his fiction. It was the first thing I ever read that felt like an explanation of how my own brain works.

In retrospect, I can see that Gordie was King. Which is probably why — even all these years later — I cannot not see King as an almost spiritual mentor, the perfect guide for me at a very specific time in my life. Whatever path I'm taking, he went that way before me.

Reiner's version is a bit sweeter than King's, with less bite and not quite the bitter aftertaste, but overall he did an admirable job of capturing what King was going for. I like the movie quite a bit, but even now I simply cannot judge it on its own terms.

I might as well try to judge my own reflection in the mirror.

50 Days 50 Films - #27 "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (Stanley Kubrick)

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with Stanley Kubrick. While I can appreciate the originality and generally uncompromising nature of his vision, I tend to find his films to be a real slog to get through. "Full Metal Jacket," "Barry Lyndon," and "2001: A Space Odyssey" are all sort of half of a great movie and half an incomprehensible, self-important mess for me. And don't even get me started on "The Shining."

Oddly, it's when Kubrick focuses his cold and sometimes savage eye toward outright comedy that he's at his best. He's made only two films that I love, this one and "A Clockwork Orange" ("Lolita" is pretty great, too). Some may quibble with calling "A Clockwork Orange" a comedy... but watch it again. I promise, if you let yourself get into the right mindset, it's absolutely hilarious.

Kubrick's point-of-view was generally pretty cruel, often bordering on sociopathic — which made him a great satirist. For my money, of the three "comedies" I've mentioned, "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) is the funniest. Even in our modern, post-Cold War era, it's absolutely vicious in its humor.

It's also one of the most quotable movies of all time:

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." — General Jack D. Ripper

"You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company." — Colonel "Bat" Guano

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" — President Merkin Muffley

"Mein Führer! I can WALK!" — Dr. Strangelove

Peter Sellers turns in a virtuosic, three-part tour-de-force performance as President Muffley, Captain Lionel Mandrake, and — of course — Dr. Strangelove himself. But Kubrick was too smart to let his acknowledged comic genius get away with chewing up all the best moments. Both George C. Scott (as General "Buck" Turgison) and Sterling Hayden (as General Jack D. Ripper) are given some choice cuts of prime rib themselves.

What makes "Strangelove" so compelling and ultimately (funny as it is) terrifying is the fact that, absurd as it is, the premise was frighteningly close to reality. If you don't believe me, just check out Sidney Lumet's "Fail Safe" from the same year. They are essentially the same film, down to the smallest of plot details. The only difference is that Lumet played it straight.

Kubrick beat Lumet to the screen by a few months and has mostly won the verdict of history ("Fail Safe" is really fucking good, by the way. You should see it). But it's important to note that both filmmakers were essentially drawing from the same source material — former R.A.F. pilot Peter George's novel "Red Alert," which managed to spook some higher ups at the Pentagon because it very clearly revealed some quite real flaws in our whole nuclear first response protocols.

These two films and this novel all came in the wake of both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was busy building bombs that yielded a payload one-tenth the power of the sun. On our own side, folks like Curtis LeMay were pre-occupied with such charming concepts as a "winnable nuclear war." Think about all this and read that New Yorker article I linked to in the previous paragraph, and then rewatch this scene and see if you find at as silly as you probably did the first time.

50 Days 50 Films - #28 "Persona" (Ingmar Bergman)

The problem with trying to talk about a film like Ingmar Bergman's 1966 masterpiece "Persona" is that I have absolutely no vocabulary with which to describe the effect it had on me. There's just no context for a film like this. What do you even compare it to?

This is a film that hits nerves for me that I didn't even know were nerves. And I have no idea how Bergman did it. The film is spooky and suspenseful, even though very little happens in a strictly narrative sense. It's erotic, even though the most flesh we get is a play of light on a bare shoulder. It's heartbreaking, even though I couldn't tell you exactly why.

This is just one of those films where there truly are no words. It simply must be experienced.

My friend Jon Curtis did his own "50 Days 50 Films" marathon, and he talked about this film. Like me, he was largely at a loss for words to describe the film's power, but he comes close with this quote:

"No need for words: just light, dark, wind, sound, conflict, eyes, and us, unseen, watching all. It’s like pulling the covers over your head as a child, with no place to be and everywhere to go. Or something thereabouts… By any measure, Ingmar Bergman is one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. He’s bold, brilliant, and ever-curious – never dodging giant themes (in "Persona": primal fears, dreams, passions, and follies), but grabs at them with eager and unembarrassed strength. His films are fleshy and erotic, yet cerebral too. You can’t look away. You can’t stop thinking about them. And deep down to your bones, you feel them – sometimes in a series of wild jolts, and other times like fingertips over anxious skin."

That's all very nice, and quite eloquently put. But it somehow just scratches the surface of what this film does to you if you open yourself up to it. It hurts in a way I can't quite wrap my head around. I wouldn't be able to do any better than him, so I think I'll just leave it at that.

50 Days 50 Films - #29 "Boys Don't Cry" (Kimberly Pierce)

When "Boys Don't Cry" came out in 1999, I would have considered myself to be a good progressive. I was already certainly sympathetic to gay rights, admittedly in a fairly abstract way. I had never actually encountered true homophobia, but I had gay friends and I generally wanted them to be happy. I thought they were.

I'm not going to say I saw this movie and suddenly understood the full depth and breadth of what would go on to become THE civil rights movement of our time. But it was definitely, in its own modest way, a real eye opener.

I had gay friends, sure, but I really had no conception of the hate and vitriol they faced on a day-to-day basis — and I certainly had no context for dealing with transgender issues. I certainly had no idea how horrible transgender men and women were too often treated — the violence and humilation they regularly found themselves subjected to. Particularly in places like Falls City, Nebraska, where Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank) moved and fell in love, and then was brutalized, raped and murdered for the crime of being different.

Kimberly Pierce's debut feature came at the tail end of the 90s indie boom, well after "Sex Lies and Videotape" and "Pulp Fiction" but a year before Christopher Nolan's "Memento." Looking back, it's a little disheartening to see how male-dominated and fundamentally hetero that whole scene was. It makes filmmakers like Pierce (along with Allison Anders, Kasi Lemmons, Lisa Cholodenko and others) all that much more important. While us dudes were wrapped up in our neo noirs and shoot-em-ups (which I love... just look at my list), women like Pierce were busy crafting nuanced films that changed the way gay and trans men and women were depicted on film. In their hands, LGBT people weren't just victims or wacky best friends. They were our brothers and sisters and our sons and daughters.

"Boys Don't Cry" stood high above the others, as much for its public profile as anything else. It won rave reviews, had huge audiences (for a film of this type), and won Hilary Swank a well-deserved Oscar. But this is not to say that it is in any way overrated. If I were to make a list of the five most essential films of the last 20 years — the ones that absolutely need to be preserved for posterity — this one would come at or near the top of the list.

Coming in the wake of Matthew Shephard's murder in Wyoming, this film dealt with the true-life murder of another LGBT person in another small Midwestern town. It was an important subject, and an essential one for its time. But it's also just a very good film. Pierce approaches this story and these characters with a deep empathic sensitivity, but doesn't romanticize or pull any punches. Her analysis is sharp and incisive, and she scrutinizes the dynamics that lead to Teena's death with an almost cold, documentarian's eye.

Pierce is a courageous filmmaker, but also a skilled one. She trusts in the material and her own abilities enough to not pad the movie with needless melodrama. As tragic as the story is, she doesn't treat it as a tragedy. There aren't a lot swelling strings here. She allows us to get to know Brandon Teena as a person, first and foremost, long before we ever come to see him as a victim.

She lets us like Brandon.

Incredibly for that time, Pierce even lets us experience the heart-pounding eroticism of Brandon's relationship with Lana Tisdale (Chloe Sevigny). Those scenes are hot, and this is not a small point — even if maybe it should be. In 1999, showing a trans man cinematically as a source of a classically MALE sexual power was not just bold — it was truly brave.

By letting us fall in love with Brandon and Lana a little bit, Pierce allows us to forget what's to come. We sink into the relationship and get comfortable there, so when the brutality (in the form of terrifyingly human John Lotter, portrayed magnificently by Peter Sarsgaard) arrives, it's that much more shocking.

Pierce doesn't flinch. She forces us to endure the full measure of Brandon's degradation. And Swank throws herself into the role with a fearlessness and raw vulnerability that is staggering. It's nearly unbearable to watch.

I've heard this movie described as a classic "one-timer." I disagree. Yes, it's a hard sit at the end. But Swank and Sevigny bring their characters to life and make them our friends. We owe it to our friends to stand by them.