50 Days 50 Films - #6 "Moon" (Duncan Jones) ... also, why Woody Allen won't be on this list

Okay, before I talk about Duncan Jones's "Moon" (2009), let me address an impromptu, oddly hostile message I got from someone reading this blog who asked if, now that I'm coming to the end of my list, I would "put [my] prejudices aside" and cover a Woody Allen movie.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: I have engaged in a couple Facebook debates about the child molestation allegations against Allen, and I think it's been pretty clear that — without knowing anything — I tend to at the very least remain suspicious. Do I have any information that Allen is guilty? No. Do I think he's creepy and gross? Yep.

Do I feel hypocritical because I included a Roman Polanski film on this list? Yes, I do. Can I justify it? No, not very well. When it comes to Polanski, I've drawn a somewhat arbitrary line in my brain between the films he made before his rape conviction and the films he made afterwards. I fully admit that the distinction doesn't really hold up to any sort of objective logic, but I cling to it because I do enjoy those earlier films and I can't completely toss them out of my heart. The most I can do now is try to avoid the later ones, because they (and he) ick me out.

Which is basically how I feel about Allen. He just icks me out.

I do not deny the quality of some of his films. But this isn't meant to be a "greatest films of all time" list. These are my personal favorite films. And, ick factor aside, Woody Allen just isn't my thing. I can kind of appreciate a film like "Annie Hall" or "Hannah and Her Sisters," but I can't say they provoke a strong emotion in me one way or the other. Whatever. I'm just not a fan. So get off my dick, rando.

Okay, with that out of the way, let me get to "Moon."

I'm not very often floored by movies anymore. This is probably a result of having gone to film school and then continuing to pursue this whole filmmaking thing as a vocation. A lot of the magic is frankly gone for me. Like most film students, I can sort of see the proverbial Man Behind the Curtain whenever I see a movie, and it has become harder and harder for me to simply let myself go and get swept up the way I used to.

There's that whole adage that if you love working on cars, you probably shouldn't become a mechanic. As soon as something becomes your job, it ceases to be your escape.

So it is with a very palpable sense of shock, relief and utter joy that I can say "Moon" completely and utterly grabbed me. Seeing this film for the first time was a rapturous experience. I haven't been this caught up in a film in fifteen years, maybe longer ("Let the Right One In" and "Rust and Bone" come close).

Duncan Jones is, of course, the son of David Bowie. But don't let the implied Hollywood nepotism sway you. This is probably the most self-assured, exquisitely crafted science fiction film in two decades, and it's unthinkable to me that this a debut. It's an instant classic, destined (I believe) to be mentioned in the history books right alongside "Blade Runner" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" forever.

On paper, it's not the most wholly original concept. And certainly the overt nods to earlier films in the genre have garnered the film its fair share of criticism. But just set that aside and let yourself fall into the story. Sam Rockwell delivers one of those powerhouse performances that come along maybe once in a generation. Daniel Day Lewis couldn't have done better. I've screened this film multiple times in my classes, have broken it down scene by scene, and I have still not found one false note in his portrayal of Sam Bell, a lone technician going slowly insane in an isolated mining base on the moon.

Rockwell carries the film entirely on his shoulders, but he gets a strong assist from Kevin Spacey as the voice of GERTY, a sentient computer that is very deliberately meant to evoke memories of HAL-9000. But Spacey manages to find odd little emotional nuances in his soothing robotic monotone that give GERTY shades of life and, dare I say, humanity that you would never expect. He creates a character that transcends the classic influence and becomes iconic on its own.

"Moon" and "Let The Right One In" are recent films, and they arrived late in my development as a cineaste and filmmaker. So rather than provide a bedrock influence to my own work (the way, say, "Jacob's Ladder," "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and "Blue Velvet" did), they raise the bar and show me a way forward.

These are films — "Moon" especially — that I wish I had made.

50 Days 50 Films - #7 "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (Tobe Hooper)

There is one specific moment in Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974) that immediately elevates it way beyond the confines of the slasher genre that it helped create.

Up to this point, we had been pretty much exclusively following a fairly anonymous group of teenagers as they continue to inexplicably wander into your average everyday scary farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, where they are systematically slaughtered by the human-face-masked Leatherface (Gunner Hansen).

After the second teenager wanders in to be unceremoniously snatched up and hung from a meathook in perhaps the movie's most infamous scene, we think we know exactly what this movie is going to deliver. Leatherface is a classic movie monster — faceless, brutal, and inhuman.

But when yet another teenager wanders in to be summarily dispatched, Hooper makes the startling choice to stay with Leatherface. We see him freaking out, searching through the house and looking out the windows before sitting down to contemplate what's happening. Suddenly, we understand what he's thinking: "where the hell do they keep coming from?" He's just as freaked out as the kids.

And, just like that, Leatherface becomes a human being. It's a quiet moment, subtle and easily forgotten amongst all the carnage. But it makes the film incalculably more frightening, because with that single gesture Hooper has reoriented this film within something resembling a real world.

I was way too young when I first saw "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," maybe nine or ten at a friend's slumber party. I've always had a high constitution for horror movies, then and now. It takes a LOT to scare me. But this film terrified me then, and it still terrifies me. There's a batshit brutality to this film, not in the violence itself (it's fairly tame by today's standards) but in the film's entire sensibility. It's got a grubby, lived-in documentary feel that was completely new to the horror genre at the time (this was decades before the "found footage" genre hit its stride).

"The Texas Chain Saw" massacre seems to be a movie made by crazy people. There's a sense of danger in its very presentation that is deeply unsettling. You actually worry about the actors, not the characters, because Hooper seems to be legitimately traumatizing them (and, if you read anything about the making of the film, you realize this isn't far from the truth).

This is a feature of many horror movies from the 70s, where filmmakers were given maybe more freedom than they responsibly knew what to do with. Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" does a similar thing, and in some ways it manages to be even more disturbing than "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" because you get the sense that Craven had no idea how fucked up his movie was. He cuts away from all the rape and carnage to give us odd interludes of slapstick comic relief or lilting folk-rock interludes.

The difference between these films and Hooper's masterpiece is that, through all the insanity, you realize that Hooper has complete control over the material. He knows exactly what he's doing. The movie devolves to sheer lunacy in its last half hour, but it gets under your skin right from the start. The sequence with the Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) in the van toward the beginning is as suspenseful as anything Hitchcock ever accomplished on eight times the budget, and the single chiaroscoro shot of the Cook (Jim Siedow) sadistically tormenting Sally (Marilyn Burns) in the pickup truck is bloodcurdling in its simplicity. Hooper knows enough to play the scene off of Siedow's reaction — the vicious leer that erupts on his face — rather than the violence itself. The fact that we can only hear Sally's muffled screams makes the scene way more excruciating than it would have been if Hooper had indulged the impulse to show too much.

This movie has been remade, rebooted, and parodied so often that it's a true testament to Hooper's berzerker vision and his sense of craft that the original holds up as well as it does. Unfortunately, he would never be this good again.

50 Days 50 Films - #8 "Barton Fink" (The Coen Bros.)

Here's another one of those Sophie's Choice situations that lists like this always create. Knowing I'd eventually have to cover the Coen Brothers at some point, I've been vascillating daily between this film, "Fargo," "Miller's Crossing," and "Raising Arizona." Except I also wanted to write about "The Big Lebowski." And I think "The Man Who Wasn't There" is totally underrated and deserves some love. And, of course, there's "Burn After Reading," and "A Serious Man," and "Blood Simple," and...and...and...

So I'm going with "Barton Fink" not because I necessarily think it's the Coens' best film (although an argument could be made for it), but because it, to me, encompasses all the various Coens in one truly weird film.

It's got the funny Coens. Almost everything with Tony Shalhoub as producer Ben Geisler and Michael Lerner as studio boss Jack Lipnick is laugh-out-loud hilarious. And the stuff with John Goodman is side-splitting... in more ways than one.

It's got the poignant Coens. John Turturro perfectly captures both Barton's extreme arrogance and his crippling insecurities. Any writer watching this move will be able to relate.

It's got the scary Coens. When Barton discovers Audrey's corpse on the blood-soaked mattress next to him, you'll feel a genuine shiver up your spine.

And... it's got the fucked up Coens that we all love. The movie takes an infamous turn (SPOILERS in link) in the last 20 minutes that will leave you reeling and had critics sharply divided when it was released. When I saw this as a teenager, I knew I loved it but I had absolutely no idea what to make of it.

Like most Coen Brothers films, this is a movie I can watch over and over and over again and still discover something new. Maybe just a prop, or a specific tic on Turturro's face. Doesn't matter. Nothing in this film is misplaced. Everything has meaning.

It would be inaccurate to say that this is the Coens at their peak, because they've been pretty much at their peak for 25 years. They're probably the most consistently brilliant filmmakers of the last quarter century, and this film is just one more startling example of that.

50 Days 50 Films - #9 "Ghostbusters" (Ivan Reitman)

The first film I remember seeing in a movie theater was Steven Spielberg's "E.T." (1982). I was four years old and the thing I remember most was my dad holding me in the lobby of the DeVargas Mall theater in Santa Fe while I cried my poor little eyes out at the end.

I was maybe just old enough to kind of understand what a movie was — i.e. a story that I got to watch — and I remember seeing TV interviews with Spielberg and somehow comprehending that this goofy bearded guy in the baseball cap made "E.T." What that meant, I didn't know. He was just the boss. I think, at that time, I thought Spielberg was the guy whose job it was to make all of the movies.

It was a couple years later when I saw Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters" (1984). The TV trailer scared me — which, of course, meant I wanted to see it. I remember my mom explaining to me that it was a comedy (watching that trailer now it's so obvious, but at the time it was the spooky stuff that grabbed me). I can't remember if my parents took me or someone else did, but I know I saw it in the theater as well.

The experience was seismic. I loved it, of course — it was scary, to my delight, but it was also really funny — but, even more important, I think it was the first movie I saw that made me say "I want to do that."

I was either six or seven, so by then I had just enough awareness to not only understand what a movie was in vague terms, but to have at least a fundamental understanding of how a movie was made. Someone sat down and wrote a story, and then someone else took a camera and filmed other someones pretending to be in the story. The someone with the camera was a "director" (it would be years before I understood the difference between a director and a cinematographer) and the someones  pretending were "actors."

This was crazy to me. It was essentially what my friends and I did on the playground at school every day. I couldn't then — and cannot now — fundamentally see the difference. It was doing "let's pretend" for a living.

As the painfully shy, proto beta-male that I was at the time, I knew right away I didn't want to be an "actor." That seemed way too scary. But I had just enough burgeoning alpha in me to think I could maybe be a "director." Certainly, I could be a "writer."

But I wanted to hang out with the actors. They seemed fun. I love Bill Murray as much as anyone else, but the guy I wanted to get to know was Dan Ackroyd. He seemed approachable, like the sort of goofy uncle who would take you to the amusement park and let you eat as much candy as you wanted until you threw up, then give you a Tic Tac and tell you not to tell your parents. I didn't really have a sense of celebrity at the time, so it just seemed to me that he was a guy you could hang out with.

"Ghostbusters" made the whole process of making a movie seem really fun. It seemed like a bunch of friends hanging out, coming up with something crazy, and then just going out doing it. I couldn't believe that this was an actual job that grownups could do. It seemed so silly, but that revelation was profound.

As a movie, "Ghostbusters" holds up remarkably well. As with some of the other films on this list, I don't have a whole lot to say about it. You all know how great it is, and I suspect I don't have to convince you.

As a personal fork in my own road, however, it's absolutely priceless.

50 Days 50 Films - #10 "The French Connection" (William Friedkin)

If Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" created the New Hollywood of the 1970s, then William Friedkin's "The French Connection" (1971) perfected it.

There are only few movies — "Birth of a Nation," "Citizen Kane," "The Wild Bunch," etc. — that you can truly say pushed the narrative cinematic form forward in a single leap, and "The French Connection" is one of them. It completely redefined the Hollywood action movie, creating a template for the genre that is still used today.

Like "Citizen Kane," this is a hard movie to talk about because it is so iconic that pretty much everything that can be said about it has already been said. It's big, bombastic, gritty, and brilliant. All I'll add to the conversation is to say that, from my perspective, Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle is perhaps the greatest movie cop in the history of ever, and that final shot has never been bested by anyone.

And that car chase. Holy shit. It still holds up.

Friedkin went on just a couple years later to similarly redefine the horror movie with "The Exorcist," before sadly descending into a morass of alternately over-ambitious and hackily forgettable movies over the next several decades ("Sorcerer," his 1971 remake of Clouzet's 1953 French classic "Wages of Fear," is a mess... but a big beautiful one). He managed to make two of the best films of all time, however, so he still has to be reckoned with.

50 Days 50 Films - #11 "Let The Right One In" (Tomas Alfredson)

In my review of Rob Reiner's "Stand By Me," I talked at length about how powerfully I identified with the character of Gordie Lachance as a kid.

Well, Tomas Alfredson's superlative Swedish vampire film, "Let the Right One In" (2008), had a very similar — although admittedly much darker — effect on me.

As much as I was Gordie, I was also Kåre Hedebrant's Oskar. Bullied. Brooding. Lonely. Seething with rage and impotent fantasies of violent retribution against all the other kids who, in my mind, had done me wrong. When Oskar takes his little pocket knife and mutters "squeal like a pig" while stabbing the tree in his courtyard, I shuddered. 

Because I've been there.

(This sense of identication, by the way, made watching the American remake, "Let Me In" — set in the 1980s and filmed in my home town of Los Alamos, NM — a singularly surreal viewing experience).

I can't tell you how much I would have loved to have a little vampire girlfriend to watch my back when I was a kid. Maybe rip off a few heads. There's some powerful wish-fulfillment at work here.

The genius of "Let The Right One In" is that, scary as it is, it is a truly haunting love story. You know that Oskar's newfound bond with Eli (Lina Leandersson) is bad news. You only need to contemplate her relationship with Håkan (Per Ragnar)— a middle-aged, broken man who does her murderous bidding for her — to see where things are going. And yet, you root for them. Alfredson allows us to feel the "love" between Oskar and Eli, to identify with it and experience it right along with them. But he gives you just enough remove to also be able to see its truly horrifying implications. You want to tell Oskar to run away with Eli, but at the same time you want to scream at him to run away from Eli. This cognative dissonance is where the movie's true tension lies.

Everyone talks about the swimming pool scene. And, yeah, it's a showstopper. But, to me, the most disturbing shot of the film is the last — Oskar on the train with the box, sitting there with that serene smile on his face. It almost make me nauseous now just thinking about it.

NOTE: Do NOT read John Ajvide Lindqvist's source novel. It is terrible and, dare I say, it actually gets everything wrong. Alfredson saw the potential in the pile of Lindquist's dung, and wrung his own story out of it. Just stick with his vision.

SECOND NOTE: Actually, "Let Me In" is better than you might think. I have some problems with it, but they managed to put together at least a serviceable remake. But watch the original first if you can.

 

50 Days 50 Films - #12 "Shaun of the Dead" (Edgar Wright)

I really kind of resent the whole funny zombie thing.

When I first saw "Night of the Living Dead," it struck a very particular nerve for me. I followed it up very quickly with "Dawn of the Dead" and after that I just couldn't get enough. I watched all the zombie movies I could find. Most of them, frankly, were terrible. Nobody got it the way Romero got it. But I was still entranced. There's just something fundamentally terrifying about the zombie to me in a way that vampires, werewolves, serial killers, etc. never will be. It's all about entropy and decay, the slow strangling death of the human species. It's about the end coming not in a great redemptive ball of fire (either through an act of God or nuclear fuckery), but right down in a gutter where your dead mom is chewing on your entrails. It's a dirty, foul way to shuffle off this mortal coil.

It was the early/mid-90s when I discovered Romero, so zombies weren't really a thing back then. They were my monster. Romero and his legion of the living dead belonged to me.

This, of course, all changed in the early/mid-2000s, and now we're caught up in the midst of a great zombie Renaissance that, to me, is as unwelcome as it is utterly baffling. I hate to be a whiny hipster about it, but I was into zombies before they were cool.

Most of the new zombie stuff is pretty terrible (to be fair, most of the old zombie stuff was pretty terrible, too). But it's terrible in a new way — self-aware and ironic in a way that I just find insufferable.

I refuse to read "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," because fuck that shit. There's even a book I see on the horror shelves at Barnes & Noble that's all about the Beatles as zombies. I mean, come the fuck on.

Zombies have been neutered.

They're, like, cute now.

Ugh.

Granted, there has been some good stuff over the last few years, stuff that does honor the zombie for the horrible nightmare it is. Max Brooks's "World War Z" is as good as everyone says it is (the movie not so much). Justin Cronin's "The Passage" is technically about vampires, but he captures the melancholy spirit that typifies the best of the zombie genre. I have a love-hate relationship with "The Walking Dead," but I appreciate that they're interested in exploring the essential tragedy and sadness of what a zombie apocalypse would really look like.

And then there's this short film, which does in seven minutes what "The Walking Dead" struggles to do over the course of a season.



But the funny zombie thing is the worst.

EXCEPT. "Shaun of the Dead."

I can't even begin to express the level of love I have for this film. When I think of the movies I've laughed at the hardest over the last, I dunno, 15 or 20 years, "Shaun of the Dead" is way up at the top of the list.

What makes this film different? Well, for one thing, it pretty much invented the modern funny zombie thing ("Return of the Living Dead" doesn't count. It's funny in a very 80s, camp way which is markedly different from the current trend). What has become so annoying to me in the decade since was completely fresh and original at the time.

But it's also just better. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are absolute comic geniuses with an impeccable sense of timing that is pretty much unmatched by anyone else working today. In fact, there isn't a weak spot in entire cast. Everyone is working at the top of their game. The writing is incredibly sharp, each joke funnier and more quotable than the last.

Edgar Wright's direction is the real revelation here. It's hard to believe this a debut film (granted, he had been honing his craft in British television for years before). It's remarkably self-assured. Every shot and every edit is meaningful. Fully half of the laughs in this film come from what he's doing with the camera rather than the performances.

But, as silly as this film is, it manages to transcend parody and work as a legitimate zombie film. I wouldn't call it scary, exactly. But they get it. Shaun isn't just a bundle of comic tics and clever one liners, any more than Ben from "Night" is a stock horror-movie hero. Wright follows Romero's lead in using the zombies as a catalyst for personal crisis and growth. Shaun is a real person, with genuine desires and very human flaws. The movie is about growing up. It's about friendship. It's about family. It's also about clubbing a zombie to death with a cricket bat.

This tricky balancing act has become a trademark of the trio's "Cornetto Trilogy" ("Shaun," "Hot Fuzz," and last year's "The World's End"). I'm consistently stunned by Wright, Pegg and Frost's ability to balance silliness and absurdity with grounded, personal storytelling. Pegg and Frost are as good when they're being serious as they are when they're hamming it up, and they're able to make that shift on a dime, sometimes three or four times within a single scene.

For my money, "Shaun" is the best of the three, but all three films are works of comic genius and truly stellar filmmaking. I don't need any more funny zombies, but I'll be watching and rewatching "Shaun of the Dead" until the day I die.