#30: Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth, 1984)
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to issue my disclaimer about comedies a few entries
back--of my last three picks, two count for sure and the other arguably does.
This is the Bill Forsyth film that flew under the radar back when he was getting a fair amount
of attention in the ‘80s. It started with Local Hero, which I like almost as much as Comfort
and Joy; I would have been okay with including that somewhere near the beginning of my list.
I think we got Gregory’s Girl soon after over here, even though in Scotland it was made and
released earlier. I didn’t much care for that one, although I know it has a following. Criti-
cal enthusiasm for Forsyth reached critical mass a few years later with Housekeeping, which
came after Comfort and Joy: some ecstatic reviews upon release (Sarris might have had it as
his favourite film of ’87), yet it’s now something of a forgotten film. I’ve been meaning to
rewatch it for years. I found it ponderously slow at the time, but I’m guessing I’d be more
open to it today. A few years after that, there was a doomed star vehicle (Being Human with
Robin Williams) that essentially killed off his career. Haven’t seen it--few have.
Comfort and Joy, like Shoot the Piano Player and Il Posto, is a low-key examination of one
man’s melancholia, in this case a popular morning drive-time DJ in Scotland who feels he’s
deep-down a serious person with serious things to say. The melancholia experienced by Alan
“Dickie” Bird is less cosmic than what you find in the Truffaut and Olmi films--he seems like
a basically happy guy until the mundane circumstance of his girlfriend walking out on him
intrudes. Their break-up scene as the film starts is probably the most genial of its kind that
you’ll ever see; Bird is even seen reluctantly assisting the vacating girlfriend’s helpers as
they remove all the furniture from his apartment.
Where the film goes from there is summed up perfectly by the expression on Bird’s face to-
wards the end of the accompanying clip: fanciful to the point that you don’t quite believe
what you’re seeing, yet so deftly rendered that you accept it all and go with along it anyway.
(The story is actually based on real-life events, I seem to recall, the Ice Cream Wars or some
thing like that.) The improbable intrigue that Bird finds himself caught up in is just backdrop
to the real story anyway, which finds its resolution in a throwaway scene in a hospital where
Bird hears first-hand the real value of his unserious work telling jokes and affecting funny
voices on the radio.
Three reasons I love this film so much, all of them found in the clip: 1) lots of driving
scenes, many of them at night (all the drivers are sitting on the wrong side of the car, but
that’s okay); 2) Claire Grogan from the band Altered Images; 3) jokes that leave me smiling
for days--“Give us an autograph, Dickie.” My favourite in the entire film has to do with Mr.
Softy.
(Probably not necessary in the age of instant and complete accessibility, but if you want to
see this and can’t find it, someone’s posted the whole thing on YouTube.)
#29: Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
Another pick somewhat determined by happenstance--it’s been on my floating “maybe” list
since we started, but it’s one of those films I’ve watched so many times that I wasn’t sure
I wanted to write about it. I’ve just finished watching Sybil, though, the made-for-TV movie
from 1977 that was the first serious attention Sally Fields received as an actress (a year be-
fore Norma Rae), and that has led me back to Carrie. I hadn’t seen Sybil since it first aired--
I’d been intermittently looking for a copy for some time, and finally found a cheap two-disc
reissue on Amazon a few weeks ago. It’s a movie that, if you saw it way back when, has stayed
in your mind ever since--uncomfortably so--and it was even scarier this time around. Which
brings me to the first thing I want to say about Carrie: Carrie’s mother was not the most
terrifying screen mother of the mid-‘70s. She wasn’t even close--Sybil’s mother wins that
one hands down.
Carrie is a very good horror film. The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are, to my
mind, the greatest pure horror films of the ‘70s, and back when that was enough for me, I
would have gone with one (or both) of them for this list. But Carrie’s more than that--it’s
also a great film about high school, as funny and as period-perfect as Fast Times or Dazed
and Confused or anything else that aspires to get that time in your life right. (It occurs to
me that this is the second of five films on my list that will involve either a senior prom or
homecoming dance.) If you were to lop off every scene involving telekinesis or Piper Laurie,
I bet I’d still go back to Carrie for stuff like John Travolta and Nancy Allen slapping each
other silly in the car, or for the pioneering brilliance of P.J. Soles, mother of all Valley
Girls (“Get that smirk off your face, Norma”). Brian De Palma even gets away with sticking a
fictional band doing a written-for-the-movie song into the prom scene--they’re more convin-
cingly cheesy than the Feelies in Something Wild.
Travolta, Allen, Soles, and even William Katt are all great--in trying to figure out why Katt
didn’t go on to the kind of career Travolta had, I can only surmise that he (and this may ap-
ply to Amy Irving, too) had a face that was too preternaturally angelic--and so are Laurie
and Betty Buckley. This was Laurie’s first film since The Hustler 15 years earlier--that’s
amazing. (Also a contender for my 50; I went with Hud instead.) Taking nothing away from any
of them, this is still Sissy Spacek’s film. I’ll be seeing Badlands later today, part of a
Malick series at Toronto’s Cinematheque--that and Days of Heaven together, so I may need
electroshock afterwards. I don’t know that moviegoers had ever seen anyone like Spacek when
she came along with Badlands and Carrie in the mid-‘70s. Now and again, she’ll still turn in
performances that make me think she’s the best actress alive: Affliction, The Straight Story,
In the Bedroom. (Most thankless role ever: JFK.) She was never more weirdly affecting than
in Carrie.
Perhaps not surprisingly, YouTube availability pretty much comes down to Carrie’s pyrotech-
nics at the prom (which, truthfully, I’d take over any Hitchcock scene), the coda, or the
trailer. I wish I could link to Travolta and Allen in the car--their back and forth is worthy
of a ‘30s screwball comedy (with Martha & the Vandellas as a bonus). Not to be, so remember:
they’re all going to laugh to you.
#28: Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996)
First words that pop into my mind when I think of Fargo: “Total fuckin’ silence.” Not “yah”
or “Margie,” but “total fuckin’ silence”--like it’s a Bergman tribute or something.
Something I’ve made note of elsewhere: there have been so few films in my life where my
opinion was upgraded drastically over time--if not a full 180, then close enough--that I
can recount them individually. The first instance where I remember this happening was King
of Comedy, which so threw me the first time I detested it; when I took a second look, its
bizarre flatness began to make perfect sense, and it now safely sits in my second tier of
Scorsese favourites. The strongest feeling I took away from my first viewing of Lost in
Translation was tangible disappointment, having loved The Virgin Suicides so much--more
on the both of them later. Took me at least three tries to realize how great Gus Van Sant’s
Elephant is; I went from complaining that the kids were empty abstractions to finding it
hard to imagine how you could render their deaths so movingly if the film had been done
any other way.
I did not initially sign onto the Fargo juggernaut in 1996 (spearheaded by Siskel and Ebert--
when Siskel died, I recall Ebert saying that Fargo encapsulated everything he loved about
movies). There were things I liked about it, but they were brushed aside by the most obvious
of objections: it seemed like a work of telegraphed condescension, and all those “yah”s drove
me right around the bend. At that point in time, there was one Coens film I considered a
masterpiece (Miller’s Crossing--still do), while I was indifferent to the rest of what I’d
seen. Today, Fargo is one of those films that’s like comfort food to me: I watch it once or
twice a year, always when nothing else appeals to me and I just feel like completely losing
myself in something.
I adjusted to the “yah”s, which lifted the veil on something that should have been obvious
from the start: the directors love these characters, especially (of course) Marge Gunderson.
Far from what seemed like a lot of folksy shtick to me at first, I now find myself caught
up in this vast, ominous machine--foreshadowed perfectly by the low-angle shot of the Paul
Bunyan monument early on--that ends in a pitifully sad place: Marge’s uncomprehending “And
for what? For a little bit of money” as she drives the one dumb lunk off to jail, followed
by Jerry Lundegaard’s hapless demise. (A sadness punctuated by the serene coda with Marge
and her husband.)
There’s still one thing about the film I don’t like. Yes--the Mike Yanagita detour. Ebert and
Siskel thought he was one the film’s most miraculous inventions, and I think I can piece to-
gether an argument that someone might make for his centrality. For me, his lunch with Marge
is painfully awkward enough that it’s simply unpleasant to watch; take it away, and I don’t
think you’re left with any less of a film.
I’m very happy that Frances McDormand won the Academy Award; William H. Macy somehow didn’t
(show me the money and all of that), and Steve Buscemi wasn’t even nominated. Ditto Peter
Stormare as Buscemi’s accomplice, but as indicated earlier he doesn’t say a whole lot, not
unless it concerns pancakes.
#27: Broadcast News (James Brooks, 1987)
Give me one minute, please--this is tough.
Jeff has just listed what I’m guessing will be the most demanding film of the 150-minus-
duplications that the three of us end up picking. (Not meant as a value judgement--simply
as a practical matter, a slow-moving, subtitled 15-hour film makes certain demands on you.)
I can’t do any better on that side of the film-going spectrum, not unless I go with Andy
Warhol’s Empire or something like that, so I’ll double back and pick what could well be
the least demanding. If you have no use for it, Broadcast News might be the very defini-
tion of middlebrow (or “midcult,” as Dwight Macdonald called it): an innocuous bit of
fluff with pretensions towards social significance. It recently got a Criterion reissue,
so I guess that bestows upon it some veneer of art. Mind you, you can say the same of
Armageddon and The Blob.
Middlebrow, probably; I’ll instead say it’s standing in here for all those classic screw-
ball comedies like Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey (and His Girl Friday) that I’ve
seen and enjoyed, but which again have faded from view for me. No use for James Brooks’s
As Good as It Gets, and I’ve pretty much forgotten his Terms of Endearment, but Broadcast
News I’ve seen at least 10 times. Yes, I think it’s that good.
If Brooks has a signature style, I wouldn’t know what it is anyway--there’s not a lot going
on in Broadcast News visually or directorially. It’s the three principal performers who
bring me back, Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks especially. Hunter’s Jane Craig (seemingly
modelled on Jane Pauley) is a maniacally intense version of that famous line from the
first Mary Tyler Moore episode, also a Brooks project: “You’ve got spunk.” If you remember
Ed Asner’s comeback, you’ll know that spunk is not necessarily endearing, but Craig’s
perpetual overdrive is mitigated by her habit of blubbering uncontrollably whenever she
stops to catch a breath. Throw in a weirdly appealing accent, and she’s one of my favour-
ite female lead characters ever. Albert Brooks must have had a major hand in the conception
of Aaron Altman; lines like “Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation
made us more attractive?” could be dropped right into Lost in America or Modern Romance.
And William Hurt, an actor I don’t always like, manages a tricky balancing act: he’s re-
quired to be intellectually obtuse enough that he’s always a half-step behind everyone
else, but at the same time sharp enough to use that as a way to manipulate others and ad-
vance his career. (Which brings to mind Alaska for some reason, reminding me that one of
the best jokes in the film involves Alaska.)
There’s so much going on between the three of them, you can mull over or discard the movie’s
big revelation as need be: network news is sometimes more in the business of entertaining
than informing. Network news barely exists in 2011, but in broader outline the issue never
really goes away, witness Anthony Weiner yesterday and whoever grabs our attention tomor-
row. You won’t need Broadcast News to open your eyes to that. (I do, though, like the way
the surprise twist is handled towards the end--it completely caught me off guard the first
time.)
Back on Wednesday. We’ll meet at the place near the thing where we went that time.
#26: Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975)
This should more accurately be placed a little higher on my list, but I've just finished
watching a rental copy, and I want to write about it right away. Like Comfort and Joy,
it's probably about as close as you can get to "not all that easy to see" in this day and
age. (Frederick Wiseman sells expensive copies on his website.) I've seen it three times
now.
If I had to pick one single film to encapsulate (from a distance--I was only a teenager at
the time) my sense of what the mid-'70s felt like, Welfare would be on my short list with
two or three others. What I mean is, my sense of the mid-'70s then was the same as any teen-
ager's would have been, and I was preoccupied with the same things that a teenager would
be preoccupied with today. The lives of welfare recipients were not on that list. But when I
piece the story together retroactively, with an adult's understanding of Nixon's resignation,
the Patty Hearst story, the assassination attempts on Gerald Ford, Ford’s “drop dead” to New
York City, and all the other stuff that was happening at the time, Welfare speaks to all of
that in ways that are amazingly prescient and resonant. Prescient because it was actually
filmed in 1972, before any of that happened; resonant because, in short, it's a cinéma véri-
té plunge into a country on the brink of collapse. You can date the beginning of that col-
lapse to the JFK assassination, escalation in Vietnam, 1968, or wherever you choose, but
Welfare really does feel like the end of the road.
Wiseman famously directs films about social institutions: high schools, hospitals, courts,
boxing gyms, etc. Welfare is exactly as advertised (Wiseman’s knack for intentionally mun-
dane titles is as dryly precise as the Pet Shop Boys'): he takes his camera into a New York
welfare agency, and you spend almost three hours watching people argue, plead, and hiss in-
vective at each other, as clients and agents try to negotiate their way through the Byzantine
rules and regulations that govern eligibility for government assistance. “At each other” is
misleading--most of the time, people talk past each other in Welfare. The clients are caught
in this (the cliché applies) Kafkaesque cycle of getting bounced from government agency to
government agency, and one after another, they seem to be delivering a tale of misery they
know by heart by now. The government employees who try to process them, who try to piece
together their stories and set them straight on what they need to do to get a cheque (or
maybe just an appointment, or something called a “fair hearing”), seem to be asking a lot
of questions that circle around each other and lead nowhere. Nothing much ever seems to get
accomplished. I’ll quote the exact words (dutifully transcribed by yours truly) of a woman
I count as the film’s most unforgettable client, an apoplectic middle-aged black woman with
a weirdly menacing black streak down her forehead. She’s trying to sort out her mother’s
situation:
Welfare Agent: “You’re making it sound like it’s my fault.”
Woman: “It’s not my fault, either. It’s not his [her father’s] fault, he’s in the hospital.
It’s not her [points at her mother] fault, she’s sick. Whose fault is it?”
It’s a question that is never answered in Welfare--and, what’s so perfect about Wiseman’s
technique, I’m not sure the film even tries. Wiseman just recedes into the background and
watches it all happen.
#25: Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
If you haven’t read Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, do so--I think I’d pick it as
my favourite film book not by Kael or Stanley Kauffmann. Great premise: take the five best-
picture nominees from 1967, follow their stories from conception to completion to their
eventual showdown for the hardware, and use that as a window onto profound changes with-
in the industry and within the country at large.
One thing I loved about it is that Harris takes a step back from the ‘70s, the decade that
has forever been my own frame of reference when it comes to movies (and just about every-
thing else, too), and lays the foundation for what was just around the corner. I think it’s
pretty easy to pinpoint the five American films that most built that bridge from ’67 to ’70:
two of them, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, are covered in Harris’s book, while the
other three--Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and Midnight Cowboy--appeared in 1969. Judging
by the name that Steven provided for this group, I’m pretty sure The Wild Bunch will be high
on his list; I’m guessing that Bonnie and Clyde will show up on at least one of Steven’s or
Jeff’s lists; I’d be a little surprised if Easy Rider turns up anywhere. (Unless it already
has with Lost in America.) I like them all to varying degrees, but The Graduate and Midnight
Cowboy are the two from that group that have far and away meant the most to me over the years.
There have been times when I might have listed one or the other as my #1. I don’t have room
for both at this point in the countdown, so Midnight Cowboy it is--or, as John Candy would
have said in Dr. Tongue and Woody Tobias Jr.’s SCTV remake, it’s Midnight Cowboy, y’all.
I get the feeling that The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy haven’t worn nearly as well as Bon-
nie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch among critics. Whereas the latter two seem very modern
today, I’ve seen Nichols’ and Schlesinger’s films dismissed as the work of dilettantes--the
kind of (counter-) cultural artifacts that are too clever, too patronizing, and ultimately
too glib to be taken seriously. Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch helped create the mo-
ment; The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy cashed in on it. (When I make these vague assertions,
trust me that they’re based on rock-solid evidence--there are people out there, and they are
talking.)
I can see some validity to that view. (I’ll leave Benjamin Braddock to his scuba gear and
plastics at this point, and get on with Midnight Cowboy.) When Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman
trip the light fantastic at the film’s big climactic party--“If it’s free, I ain’t steal-
in’”--the walk-on-the-wild-side decadence is pitched so over the top that it seems less like
a Warhol happening than a slightly more drugged-out Laugh-In or Playboy After Dark shindig.
(There’s a Factory party depicted in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol that seems much closer
to the truth; people dance to Motown and the Lovin’ Spoonful, but maybe that’s just the dif-
ference between 1965 and 1969.) And when Schlesinger juxtaposes Voight and Sylvia Miles
going at it with a frenetic television montage of Everything Rotten About America, he may
as well be Stanley Kramer. There are other lapses of heavy-handedness.
So of course I love practically all of it, even the party scene. It’s all window dressing
for Voight and Hoffman. I’m having a hard time thinking of comparable films that are so dom-
inated by two lead actors in quite the same way (I can think of a few where two lead actors
are accessories to the story, but here it’s the other way around). When I see Voight on TV
these days, railing against Obama and carrying water for the Tea Party, I’m baffled and sad-
dened. How do you get from there to here? I’ll stop short of saying that it’s ridiculous they
were both beaten by John Wayne for Best Actor that year, because a) it’s easily explained
(X rating, vote-splitting, and the Lifetime Achievement Award thing), and b) I’ve never seen
True Grit.
I’m not really offering any analysis here...You’ve seen Midnight Cowboy--you don’t need any-
thing from me. I will tell you that my friend Peter and I have been quoting lines to each
other for years. Number-one favourite (must be delivered in weasely high-pitched whine):
“You gotta meet my friend O’Daniel.”
#24: Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2004)
I had planned on reluctantly bypassing this, but last week it was viciously attacked in the
comments section--viciously, I say--and now I have no choice but to put it on my list.
I originally came to Elephant with little interest in Gus Van Sant, and even less in Colum-
bine. There’s a real arbitrariness to the big news stories I get caught up in. I was obsessed
with the O.J. case, but hardly paid attention to Phil Spector or Robert Blake. The Japan
earthquake, the hurricane in Haiti, and even 9/11 felt remote (I know that sounds terrible),
while Katrina couldn’t have felt any more immediate. A few sex scandals I’ve been hugely in-
terested in, most not at all. I don’t know what it is that connects me to some stories while
the rest slip away. As a teacher, especially, Columbine should have felt very close.
There was that barrier to get past, and there was also Van Sant’s methodical, seemingly de-
tached manner of depicting an event that on the face of it suggests exactly the opposite
approach. Instead of chaos, much of the film involves watching kids walk through school
hallways--sometimes the same kids and the same hallways more than once. I mentioned on the
song countdown how integral music is to me when I’m required to have the necessary patience
to watch languorous, long-take filmmaking (Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, etc.). Give me some beauti-
ful music, like the Arvo Pärt song I listed on the countdown, and suddenly Matt Damon driv-
ing a car in the middle of nowhere for six minutes--Gerry, also by Van Sant--is as good as
it gets. But Elephant does not rely on music to do its work; I think there’s some music here
and there, but after seeing the film five or six times, I couldn't tell you a thing about
it.
So the first time I saw Elephant, I had the same reaction that I’ve used to describe other
films that threw me: I knew I’d seen something, I just wasn’t sure what. When I wrote about
it for Scott’s site (listing it as my 6th favourite film of 2003--hey, Steven, I gave it a
6.0!), I hemmed and hawed, praising it for what it wasn’t--sensationalistic, sentimental--
but not quite sure how to address what it was. I thought it came up short on the thing that
mattered most: feeling devastated when kids started getting killed.
Eventually, though, the film’s rhythm made perfect sense. The sheer ordinariness of the world
that the killers shatter is rendered dreamlike by Van Sant, and it slowly draws you in. One
boy snaps pictures in a park, a girl scurries off to her library job, another boy puts up a
front for his girlfriend. There’s one passage around which everything else seems to arrange
itself, and it’s repeated two or three times from different vantage points: the photographer,
the boy, and the girl pass each other in the hallway (the two boys stop and talk for a minute)
as they make their appointed rounds. Once you have a feeling for this world, once you retrieve
it from memory, when the deaths do start coming they’re indeed devastating. Which is why I say
“seemingly detached.”
Two clips, both of which foreground the killers. (Everything that’s prelude to the killings
is lightly represented on YouTube in the way of shorter clips; the whole film seems to be on
there, though.) The first is the massacre--just awful. The other is from a user, a slow-motion
assemblage of bits and pieces set to Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” the Donnie Darko song. I
think it gets at what I love about the film very, very well. Don’t bother with the comments--
I took a look and couldn’t get past the second one.
#23: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
My 23rd favourite film of all time is Chinatown, making it the first instance during this
countdown where I’ve come up against something that has already been listed (by Jeff at #30).
Based on what’s been revealed so far, this will happen again four more times; as we move
ahead, though, I’m quite sure that number will double or even triple. In most cases, and
especially as we get into our Top 10s, I’ll let my pick stand and do my best to write some-
thing that adds to whatever’s already been written. But with Cuckoo’s Nest and Chinatown, I
feel okay making a one-to-one switch. Because of Jack Nicholson and their close proximity
chronologically, the two films are very much linked together in my mind: not that they’re at
all similar in tone or stylistically, and I’m pretty sure there’s more art in Chinatown, but
I’ve seen each numerous times, and I imagine that at certain points in my life I would have
gone with Cuckoo’s Nest anyway. Best of all, I’m hoping that Jeff and/or Steven have this
slated for their lists, and this time I get to fuck with their heads instead of being the
guy scooped.
Andrew Sullivan does various “watches” on his Daily Dish blog: Cool Ad Watch, Insane Repub-
lican Watch, etc. I should have launched a Films My Friend Peter and I Like to Quote Watch
near the beginning of my list. I mentioned Midnight Cowboy earlier, and there’ve been one
or two others so far. Chinatown’s a key film from our secret shorthand: Peter gravitates
towards Noah Cross (“Just...find the girl”), I can rhyme off lines from Polanski’s “Hey there,
Kitty-Kat” scene or Nicholson and Dunaway outside the restaurant (“I happen to like my
nose...”). Whenever I break out the Nicholson, though, I usually look to Cuckoo’s Nest: “Hit
me, Chief, I’m in the open,” “The mental defective league--in formation,” “'Cause I think
we need to get to the bottom of...R.P. McMurphy.” On Nicholson’s birthday, when I play a clip
for my class, I alternate between the restaurant scene from Five Easy Pieces and the scene
in Cuckoo’s Nest where he fakes catastrophic trauma after his first electro-shock session.
That scene just kills me, especially the little wink at Will Sampson he sneaks in.
Somehow, in a film that is start-to-finish Nicholson’s show, the supporting cast is indeli-
ble. Louise Fletcher so much so that, even though I’m guessing her actual screen time is on
the light side, she won and deserved the Best Actress award that year. That look on her face
at the end of the clip below is one of the film’s great moments. The rest of the patients--
the mental defective league--is an amazingly rag-tag collection of actors who went to bigger
careers, or at least quirky roles in films elsewhere on my list: Danny Devito and Christopher
Lloyd before anybody knew who they were, the poetry teacher from Carrie in the role of Ches-
wick, Mr. Vargas from Fast Times as one of the less communicative patients. And Brad Dourif,
of course, who might be the first person you remember from the film.
I haven’t read Ken Kesey’s book, also famous. This is very unfair, but based on reviews I’ve
read that compare the two, my sense is that I wouldn’t think nearly as highly of the book.
#22: The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)
Later tonight, I’ll attend grad night for the grade 8s at my school. Sheer coincidence--I slot-
ted The Virgin Suicides for #22 about three weeks ago--but this is Prom Film #3 on my list. I
said there’d be five, but I scrapped American Graffiti somewhere along the way. The fourth will
involve not a full-out prom, but something that serves the same function.
I took the time to rewatch The Virgin Suicides over the weekend, and I’ll admit that I’ve had
some second thoughts. It’s such a mood piece, and this time I don’t think I was in exactly the
right one. I also just finished squirming through 140 minutes of The Tree of Life, which must
be one of the biggest hunks of Kael bait I’ve ever seen--it’s not the most opportune moment for
me to be listing something elliptical and self-consciously poetic and so-not-Ridgemont-High.
I considered reverting back to a film I’d dropped earlier on, Rushmore, which appeared almost
simultaneously with The Virgin Suicides and also affected me quite a bit. But I’ll stay with
Coppola’s film, because a) it had already held up over the course of six or seven previous
viewings, and b) even this time, I found the beauty of certain passages as stunning as ever.
And as improbable--I still do not know from what life experiences Coppola was able to conjure
up a world that more or less matches my own romanticized version of the mid-‘70s. She was four
years old at the time.
Well, if you believe one of the boys narrating The Virgin Suicides (which essentially means
If you believe Coppola), it’s because she’s a female--she intuitively understands everything
about me, while I’m forever trying and failing to make sense of her, from the time I’m in grade
school until, presumably, the day I die. I can go with that; I don’t necessarily believe it’s
true, but when I connect with a film on some level that runs deeper than the rational/intellect-
tual, I’m usually okay with whatever it wants me to believe. The adult Trip Fontaine (seemingly
in rehab) thinking back on Lux Libson across the decades: “She was the still point of the turn-
ing world, man.” I think that’s as valid a moment as Mr. Bernstein recalling the young woman on
the ferry in Citizen Kane.
I haven’t read Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel; I’ve come across people who prefer the book, and others
who prefer the film. It’s not difficult to imagine what the book can get at it in more detail
than the film--though all the voice-over narration does try to give some semblance of interior
lives--but the film can give you Todd Rundgren, Carole King, Heart, and others in a way that a
book simply can’t. The clip I’ve linked to is inner-circle hall of fame when it comes to pop
music in movies. What I really took notice of this time around was the scene where Rundgren’s
“A Dream Goes on Forever” plays, the party where the boys get the Down Syndrome kid to do funny,
entertaining things. They mean well. Cecelia quietly leaves the room and kills herself. It’s
such an excruciating scene to watch, you don’t necessarily question the logic of what she does.
Something else I thought of for the very first time (I don’t know why it took me so long to re-
member this): in the mid-‘70s, we had a family of Libson sisters move into the corner house on
my own street. The Martinique sisters, or something like that. They were French-Canadian, there
were four of them, and their age range lined up almost exactly with that of the Libsons. I don’t
think I ever thought of them as the still point of the turning world (that was Nancy Phillips),
but I do know my friend John and I spent a lot of time cycling past their house one summer.
#21: Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994)
I’d have to do some detective work to reconstruct the exact timeline, but I think Crumb was
the film that kicked off a window of 10-plus years where documentaries gradually started to
account for at least half of the new films I saw. There were a few before Crumb that opened my
eyes to how great a doc could be--28 Up and Let’s Get Lost come to mind; The Thin Blue Line
I didn’t care for, and Hoop Dreams took a second viewing--but starting in ’94, the number of
documentaries out there that interested me seemed to multiply exponentially from year to year.
That window hasn’t exactly closed--I’m still seeing a lot of good ones (most recent: Bobby
Fischer Against the World)--but, as Jeff says, a certain predictability of style and tone
crept in somewhere along the way. Just as an example, I wasn’t nearly as big on Inside Job
or Client 9 as everybody else was.
Crumb startled me the first time I saw it, and I still find it fascinating. I knew very lit-
tle about Robert Crumb going in. There was a Toronto outfit called Crazy David’s that used
to sell “Keep on Truckin’” T-shirts back in the ‘70s, and I think I knew that Crumb was
behind those; I’d owned Cheap Thrills for years, and probably knew he’d done the cover; I
hadn’t read a comic book by anyone in years, much less any of his. More often than not, my
favourite documentaries are those where I know very little about the subject matter going
in.
You can approach Crumb from a few different directions. It’s a film about an artist making
art; even though Crumb mostly laughs off any attempts to explain his objectives or themes, he
does, somewhat sheepishly, reveal a lot about what he does and how he does it. More specifi-
cally, Crumb is about “outsider” or “transgressive” art (hate clichés, but sometimes I relent),
with a detour or two into the phenomenon--not exactly new at the time, but newer then than
now--of political correctness; one of the highlights is Robert Hughes practically hissing the
words “Well, what do you do with anybody who doesn’t conform to the standards of Berkeley?”
There’s a little bit about Haight-Ashbury and the hippie moment, even though Crumb is adamant
that he despised all of that--he does tell a funny Janis Joplin story, though.
But more than anything--and why Capturing the Friedmans makes for a perfect set-up--Crumb
chronicles (or maybe, like Capturing the Friedmans, inadvertently stumbles onto) the most
nightmarish family unit imaginable. When I was watching Crumb again last night, I thought of
The Tree of Life. They’d make a weirdly great double-bill; I’ve already made it clear I wasn’t
all that fond of Malick’s film, but if you wanted to set two versions of life in the ‘50s under
a domineering father side-by-side, they’d do nicely. Sean Penn wanders around in The Tree of
Life’s contemporary scenes heavy with memories of his childhood. Next to Charles or Maxon
Crumb, Robert’s two brothers who are so integral to the story Terry Zwigoff tells, Penn is
the very picture of a well-adjusted adult.
I couldn’t find any clips of Charles on YouTube, which is not surprising--it’d be nice to sup-
pose that the sensitivity of YouTube users decided that, but more likely Robert intervened.
Charles is why the film was so startling the first time; he’s quite probably the single most
compelling figure I’ve ever seen in a documentary.
I’ve seen two of the three films Zwigoff’s made since Crumb: Ghost World, which I liked a lot
(had it on my decade-end Top 10), and Art School Confidential, which I thought was pretty good.
When I wrote up the decade-end list, I said I’d make an effort to see Bad Santa. Still haven’t.
#20: No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007)
I’m about 50 pages into Bill James’s Popular Crime. I like this quote from Nate Silver on the
book jacket: “It’s sabermetrics meets the Coen Brothers.” Having once written a sabermetric
defense of Milli Vanilli, I can vouch for the endless flexibility of sabermetrics. (So far the
book has been largely formula-free, but I’ve just gotten to James’s 100-point evidentiary scale
as applied to the Lizzie Borden case, so the math is picking up.)
More than any film I’ve ever seen, I needed a second viewing of No Country for Old Men. (I’m
up to about eight now.) I watched at least three-quarters of the film through splayed fingers
the first time. It wasn’t so much the violence itself, which is both graphic and plentiful--
I’ve seen lots of films that can match No Country in the quantity and ferocity of its violence.
What most unnerved me about Anton Chigurh’s various killings was the sound of that violence;
whether done with that horrific contraption he carries around or by some other means, every act
was accompanied by a loud, sharp, crystalline whoosh or thomp that cut through the silence and
made me jump out of my chair. Didn’t even have to be a killing--as one of the YouTube commen-
tators points out, the phone in the accompanying clip is lethal.
We’re into the Top 20 now, so I wouldn’t be listing No Country for Old Men if its big accom-
plishment was a lot of expertly choreographed violence, even expertly soundtracked violence.
Every third American film since Bonnie and Clyde can lay claim to expertly choreographed viol-
ence, and most of the time I can’t think of anything that causes my mind to shut down quicker.
It’s worth going back to Marge Gunderson’s “And for what? For a little bit of money?” from
Fargo at this point, and also to a line from Kael’s famous Bonnie and Clyde review: “During
the first part of the picture, a woman in my row was gleefully assuring her companions, ‘It’s
a comedy. It’s a comedy.’ After a while, she didn’t say anything.” (I always wonder whether
people like this woman actually existed when I read Kael, but we’ll put that aside.) No Coun-
try for Old Men for me is an incredibly sad film. The world that Tommie Lee Jones’s sheriff is
drawn into is several degrees more brutal and inexplicable than the one that Marge Gunderson
has to contend with. She does solve the case and restores order in the end; Jones is left to
turn his back and walk away, with the suggestion that he’ll be forever revisiting what he’s
just experienced in obscure, fragmentary dreams.
No Country for Old Men was released in close proximity to There Will Be Blood (November of
2007, just under two months earlier than P.T. Anderson’s film, according to IMDB), and the two
are closely connected in my mind. Above all else, and for all their obvious differences, they
both feel like George W. Bush films to me, large-scale reveries in which people get swallowed
up by the landscape and by lawlessness and go a little insane. I know it’s tenuous when you
start linking movies to presidential administrations--J. Hoberman pulls it off in The Dream
Life--but they share a mood that captures the waning months of the W. era well as everything
began to ground down to a halt. I’m about to do something I’ve never done and will never do
again, which is to quote Bruce Springsteen: “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in
this world.”
I’ll mention one caveat about the Chighur character I’ve made before, something that I don’t
think makes him any less of an unforgettable creation: he’s basically an American art-film
version of Freddie Kruger or Jason Voorhees, the indestructible monster that can’t be killed.
(Bardem’s hair belongs in some kind of hall of fame alongside Joe Pesci’s in JFK and Sean
Penn’s in Carlito’s Way.) No slight to Bardem or Jones, but I think the most subtle perfor-
mance in No Country is given by Josh Brolin, who’s got a foot in each of their worlds. He
ended up playing both W. and Dan White within the year; both felt like hollow mimicry.
#19: The Candidate (Michael Ritchie, 1972)
I might be forgetting something, but there are three political films I love. I’ll first quali-
fy that statement the same way I did on the song countdown, which is to say that by political
I mean overtly so, not just in the sense that you can read politics, either a little or a lot,
into most any film if you want to. (And a second qualification: documentaries excluded. The
War Room comes to mind, and there are probably others.)
The first is slated for my Top 10, although it’s really more about journalism than politics.
Not hard to guess what that one is. The second would be Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent,
which I first saw two or three years ago and gets better each time I go back. It’s far from
perfect--it’s got some of that slickness you’d expect from a big-budget early-‘60s film, and
the performances are all over the place--but I find it quite compelling nonetheless. And then
there’s The Candidate. Advise and Consent details the day-to-day maneuvering involved in get-
ting a controversial nomination through the Senate; The Candidate takes a step back and details
the day-to-day maneuvering involved in getting yourself to the Senate in the first place. The
central theme, that getting elected is no different than successfully packaging and marketing
any product, will hardly startle anyone in this day and age, and Michael Ritchie and writer
Jeremy Larner obviously owed a lot to Joe McGinniss’s The Selling of the President 1968, which
got there first. The film didn’t even necessarily startle in 1972; Stanley Kauffmann’s review
basically amounted to “Well done, but tell me something I don’t know.”
Point conceded, to a degree. What continues to amaze me about The Candidate is how unerringly
right every last detail is, and how little has changed in the intervening years. I’ve read the
McGinniss book, and I think The Candidate is a much more atmospheric, meticulous, and free-
wheeling reconstruction of a political campaign. It’s been a while, but McGinniss specifically
focussed on the advertising wing of Nixon’s ’68 campaign, as I recall; that’s only one of many
elements in Ritchie’s film. Especially in 2008, as I obsessed over first the Obama-Clinton con-
test, and then Obama-McCain, things would pop up that seemed right out of The Candidate. One
example among many: when Hillary dismissed Obama’s qualifications at one point with a brusque
“And Senator Obama gave a good speech,” it perfectly matched the Crocker Jarman spot that dis-
misses Robert Redford’s Bill MacKay with a brusque “And what are Bill MacKay’s qualifications?
His father was senator.” So maybe Kauffmann felt the film was yesterday’s news by ’72, but to
me it feels more and more prophetic with each passing year. (Obama. I don’t want to get into a
big political thing here...I get tired of it on the message board...so I’ll just say that it was
a little sobering watching The Candidate again last night at a moment when Obama’s presidency
seems more adrift than ever.)
Kael called Nashville an orgy for movie lovers, so I’ll echo her and call The Candidate an
orgy for political junkies--those like me who are addicted to the drama and the spectacle, not
to the minutiae of policy. The film is an accumulation of great moments out on the trail: a
summit with a labour leader that anticipates the closed-door meeting between Michael and Sena-
tor Geary in Godfather II; some unusable ad footage of Redford trying to interact with over-
wrought mothers at a health clinic (I swear these few seconds planted the idea for Welfare in
Frederick Wiseman’s head, and they also set up my favourite line in the film, Allen Garfield’s
“Grim scene, baby, grim scene”); an editorial from the real Howard K. Smith, who’d do it all
over again in Nashville (and a roving reporter who’s always addressing “Walter” in his spots--
nice touch); a great running joke with a groupie (you can spot her in the accompanying clip);
so forth and so on. And Peter Boyle, who steals the film.
Choosing a clip was easy. If a semi-famous film (at best) can have a famous ending, this is
it--I hear political commentators make reference to it regularly. I especially like how Red-
ford’s question is voiced almost silently the second time.
#18: Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
I’d be overstating it to say I agonized over this choice, but I have spent the last three days
going back and forth in my mind between Rushmore and Boogie Nights. Call it a dead heat for
this spot. I’m still not high enough on my list where the prospect of writing about a film
already listed by Jeff or Stephen--something I have a natural resistance to--becomes unavoid-
able. It will be at a certain point, but I’m not there yet. There was some stuff I wanted to
add to Jeff’s Boogie Nights entry, and I’ll probably go back and do so in the comments. Mean-
while, I think Rushmore is every bit as remarkable, and the two of them are closely linked for
me: within the space of a few months, there were suddenly two guys named Anderson using pop
music in ways that turned my head around more than anything I’d seen since Mean Streets 20
years ago.
I did want to double-check (I’ve watched both way too many times), so I took another look at
Rushmore for the first time in a few years. The film I love has not dimmed. It’s the rare movie
that is a) clearly autobiographical (something underscored by Anderson’s subsequent films), but
b) so fantastical that I look at it and think “Where did he ever come up with this?” I suspect
detractors (and Rushmore definitely has them) experience something close to the same reaction:
“Jesus, what is this?” We more or less mean the same thing, except that I’m awestruck while
detractors are in disbelief.
I wrote a fairly lengthy appreciation of Rushmore that was the first thing I ever posted on
the homepage I’ve been keeping for a decade. Most of the things I singled out then are the
same things I’d single out today, starting with the montage of Max Fischer’s extra-curricular
activities (first time I saw Rushmore, this sequence pulled me into the film’s universe with
such force that I don’t think I questioned a thing the rest of the way), the Who’s “A Quick
One” as Max and Herman Blume wage psychic warfare on each other, and the “I Am Waiting” se-
quence, especially the shot of Margaret Yang peering through the window at Max (an echo of
Chaplin looking at the flower girl at the end of City Lights). In subsequent viewings, my
single favourite moment became one that flashes by in a split second: the look on Bill Mur-
ray’s face when Max says “Mr. Blume, this is my father, Bert Fischer.” I would ask anyone
who thinks of Rushmore as a gimmicky, precocious film to think about those last two. There’s
much about Max that’s unlikeable to the point of being obnoxious, and I don’t think Anderson
tries to gloss over that. In the end, I love the character. Having spend my entire life as
someone who passive-aggressively waits around for people to figure out how I’m feeling about
a certain situation (and who continues to play at this past the point where anybody much
cares anymore), I envy the Max who’s able to blurt out “You hurt my feelings!” in the res-
taurant without worrying about making an idiot of himself. Which he most definitely does.
The backstory about Anderson soliciting Kael to see Rushmore is pretty famous by now. If you
don’t know the details, here they are in Anderson’s own words: According to an interview
Anderson gave with Salon, though, Kael did in fact like Rushmore: “She promoted it a little
bit to other people, that kind of thing. But I also think she thought it was weird. I don't
know if it was really her bag. But she did tell other people to see it and that she liked
it.” Clearly, Wes Anderson cares too much about what Pauline Kael thinks. Clearly, so do I.
#17: The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005)
Strange, unsettling, and a different kind of claustrophobic. Clearly autobiographical, but my
guess is that it’s the kind of autobiography that (unlike Rushmore) invents the bare minimum--
changes someone’s name from Gary to Jerry, makes the next-door neighbour a dentist instead of
a doctor, that kind of thing. But it really does feel like Noah Baumbach is recounting his
upbringing very precisely here.
It’s an upbringing that I half recognize. In broad outline, it couldn’t be more dissimilar to
my own. The two boys here--teenager Walt Berkman (Jesse Eisenberg from The Social Network) and
his younger brother Frank--live in a fairly rarefied world, less economically (although that
too) than culturally. That’s what I mean about fudging the details just enough: the Berkman
parents both write fiction, the mom for The New Yorker, whereas Baumbach’s mom was a film
critic for The Village Voice (Georgia Brown--I think I used check her reviews for a time),
and his dad is listed in Wikipedia as a novelist/film critic. The boys have a private tennis
instructor, their father’s idea of small-talk consists of authoritative dismissals of Dickens
and Fitzgerald--always a big topic of conversation around my own family’s dinner table--and
they just generally comport themselves in the detached, eccentric manner of kids privileged
enough to be a beat or three removed from the mundane concerns of less privileged kids their
age. When their parents split up, they take sides. It’s the world of Wes Anderson and Whit
Stillman--“the upper-class WASPs of the U.S. socio-cultural elite,” Wikipedia calls it, also
linking the three directors together. None of that applies to me.
What I do recognize, though, and what I’m sure most people will recognize, is a family dynamic
where a lot gets left unsaid. It’s a common theme: it’s there in Long Day’s Journey Into Night,
which is great, and it’s there in Ordinary People, which, based on dim memories from 30 years
ago, is ordinary. (Not a film for a 20-year-old, least of all one horrified to see it beat
Raging Bull for best film--I should see it again.) Big things get left unsaid--maybe we should
talk about mom’s morphine addiction--and little things. One by one they accumulate, and after
a while everyone knows the trap doors. When someone opens one up accidentally, or with the in-
tent of antagonizing someone else--The Squid and the Whale is very much about those deliberate
acts of provocation--the carefully constructed house of cards starts to teeter. In the Berkman
family, everything pivots off the father. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered another cinematic
father like the one Jeff Daniels creates here. To say he takes up a lot of oxygen would miss
the mark significantly. There is no oxygen when he’s around. Maybe that’s why the younger
Berkman son seems beyond just detached and eccentric at times. It’s more like he’s brain-
damaged.
I don’t know where Daniels’ frightening performance comes from--prior to this, he was just
the genial doofus in Something Wild to me. Laura Linney is as real as the mother as she was
in You Can Count on Me. Seems like I’ve seen a lot of memorably weird kids in American movies
the past decade, and Eisenberg and Owen Kline would head the list. I like The Social Network
a lot, but the strength of Eisenberg’s performance in The Squid and the Whale creates some
interference for me.
Here’s the final scene, one of the most elliptically perfect I’ve ever seen. The movie follows
with Bert Jansch’s “Counting Blues” over the end credits, something I wrote about in the song
countdown (Jansch’s “Running from Home” was my #4--I may still have never heard it if not for
Baumbach). I’ll repeat the key line from “Counting Blues” here: “Don’t be afraid.”
#16: To Sir with Love (James Clavell, 1967)
I had something really Sight & Soundy slated for #16, but I’ve flip-flopped a couple of picks
so I can bring Steven and Jeff's canonical reign of terror to a momentary end. Be forewarned:
I’m a great believer in the infinite powers of nostalgia, and can be very protective about the
most cherished objects of my misty-eyed reveries, so if you’re someone who dismisses such a
mindset--not naming any names here--just take three steps back and be very, very careful.
I mentioned Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution earlier, in conjunction with Midnight Cow-
boy. The not-so-secret star of the book is Sidney Poitier. He made three hugely successful
films in 1967, two of which vied, deservedly or not, for Best Picture, and inadvertently found
himself caught up squarely in the politics of the day. As cities rioted, he was #1 on the list
of 1968 box-office stars (#7 on the ’67 list--there must be a year lag in measuring that). All
three of his ’67 films put race front and center--pretty much impossible not to at the time if
your lead actor was African-American. (Even in Night of the Living Dead a year later, race is
weirdly front and center because of George Romero’s inspired decision to avoid any mention or
even awareness that his lead character happened to be African-American.) American film in 1967
meant Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Sidney Poitier.
A brief word on the other two Poitier films that year. I don’t know that anyone would argue
for In the Heat of the Night as being great art, but it’s well done, and watching Poitier and
Steiger go at it is very entertaining. I think Poitier should have won Best Actor that year
for the sum of his performances, but Steiger was otherwise a fine choice. As for Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner, well, it’s not without merit, and not as hopelessly dated as you might ex-
pect. That’s about the best I can say--it’s been a while since I last saw it.
To Sir with Love was the least consequential of the three at the time, and has probably been
seen by far fewer people (although it’s hardly obscure--I find that most people anywhere close
to my own age have seen it). If you’re puzzled by my inclusion of it here, you likely find it
no less cloying, sentimental, or naïve than Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. And indeed, Sarris
simultaneously praises and dismisses it as “super-Kramer” in The American Cinema.
Where to begin conveying what I love about it? I’m sure every teacher can point to a film or
two as the idealization of what kind of teacher you want to be and too rarely are. Mine is
split between a few films (there’s even a part of me that likes being the supercilious Kings-
field in The Paper Chase), but To Sir with Love wins that one walking away. Ending up as a
teacher wasn’t even on my radar through my 20s (I remember ridiculing a friend who went
straight from university to teachers college), but when I did finally apply at the age of
28, I know that somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind was the moment in To Sir with
Love when Poitier turns the corner on the final day, pauses, and there’s everyone all lined
up looking as angelic as can be. Once Poitier gets past the moment early in the film when he
justifiably flips out and has the (convenient, yes) light bulb go off in his head as to how
he needs to handle the class, he’s a model of temperance, good judgement, and deep concern
the rest of the way. I have my moments where I stumble onto one or another of those elevated
states of being, but mostly I’m just making it up blindly as I go along, so I really fall
for that part of the movie.
The rest of my attachment is where nostalgia takes over. I saw To Sir with Love at a very
young age (probably at a drive-in), and the music, the dinginess of East London, Judy Geeson
and Lulu, Christian Roberts as Brando/Dean, the period details, the incredible field trip to
the museum, Poitier’s dramatic gesture at the end, it all made a deep impression on me. The
clip below, Poitier and Geeson dancing to “It’s Getting Harder All the Time” at the gradua-
tion party, is in the running for my single favourite scene ever. I even love how it subverts
one of the polite racial stereotypes of its day: as Poitier lurches around preposterously,
Geeson turns out to be a fantastic dancer. Actually, I’d say that To Sir with Love is more
nuanced in its treatment of race than In the Heat of the Night. The crotchety old teacher
who baits Poitier casually slips in a couple of especially venal lines.
Remember now: be very, very careful. (Wish I could link to the SCTV parody with Bob Geldof,
but nothing on YouTube.)
#30: Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth, 1984)
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to issue my disclaimer about comedies a few entries
back--of my last three picks, two count for sure and the other arguably does.
This is the Bill Forsyth film that flew under the radar back when he was getting a fair amount
of attention in the ‘80s. It started with Local Hero, which I like almost as much as Comfort
and Joy; I would have been okay with including that somewhere near the beginning of my list.
I think we got Gregory’s Girl soon after over here, even though in Scotland it was made and
released earlier. I didn’t much care for that one, although I know it has a following. Criti-
cal enthusiasm for Forsyth reached critical mass a few years later with Housekeeping, which
came after Comfort and Joy: some ecstatic reviews upon release (Sarris might have had it as
his favourite film of ’87), yet it’s now something of a forgotten film. I’ve been meaning to
rewatch it for years. I found it ponderously slow at the time, but I’m guessing I’d be more
open to it today. A few years after that, there was a doomed star vehicle (Being Human with
Robin Williams) that essentially killed off his career. Haven’t seen it--few have.
Comfort and Joy, like Shoot the Piano Player and Il Posto, is a low-key examination of one
man’s melancholia, in this case a popular morning drive-time DJ in Scotland who feels he’s
deep-down a serious person with serious things to say. The melancholia experienced by Alan
“Dickie” Bird is less cosmic than what you find in the Truffaut and Olmi films--he seems like
a basically happy guy until the mundane circumstance of his girlfriend walking out on him
intrudes. Their break-up scene as the film starts is probably the most genial of its kind that
you’ll ever see; Bird is even seen reluctantly assisting the vacating girlfriend’s helpers as
they remove all the furniture from his apartment.
Where the film goes from there is summed up perfectly by the expression on Bird’s face to-
wards the end of the accompanying clip: fanciful to the point that you don’t quite believe
what you’re seeing, yet so deftly rendered that you accept it all and go with along it anyway.
(The story is actually based on real-life events, I seem to recall, the Ice Cream Wars or some
thing like that.) The improbable intrigue that Bird finds himself caught up in is just backdrop
to the real story anyway, which finds its resolution in a throwaway scene in a hospital where
Bird hears first-hand the real value of his unserious work telling jokes and affecting funny
voices on the radio.
Three reasons I love this film so much, all of them found in the clip: 1) lots of driving
scenes, many of them at night (all the drivers are sitting on the wrong side of the car, but
that’s okay); 2) Claire Grogan from the band Altered Images; 3) jokes that leave me smiling
for days--“Give us an autograph, Dickie.” My favourite in the entire film has to do with Mr.
Softy.
(Probably not necessary in the age of instant and complete accessibility, but if you want to
see this and can’t find it, someone’s posted the whole thing on YouTube.)
#29: Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
Another pick somewhat determined by happenstance--it’s been on my floating “maybe” list
since we started, but it’s one of those films I’ve watched so many times that I wasn’t sure
I wanted to write about it. I’ve just finished watching Sybil, though, the made-for-TV movie
from 1977 that was the first serious attention Sally Fields received as an actress (a year be-
fore Norma Rae), and that has led me back to Carrie. I hadn’t seen Sybil since it first aired--
I’d been intermittently looking for a copy for some time, and finally found a cheap two-disc
reissue on Amazon a few weeks ago. It’s a movie that, if you saw it way back when, has stayed
in your mind ever since--uncomfortably so--and it was even scarier this time around. Which
brings me to the first thing I want to say about Carrie: Carrie’s mother was not the most
terrifying screen mother of the mid-‘70s. She wasn’t even close--Sybil’s mother wins that
one hands down.
Carrie is a very good horror film. The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are, to my
mind, the greatest pure horror films of the ‘70s, and back when that was enough for me, I
would have gone with one (or both) of them for this list. But Carrie’s more than that--it’s
also a great film about high school, as funny and as period-perfect as Fast Times or Dazed
and Confused or anything else that aspires to get that time in your life right. (It occurs to
me that this is the second of five films on my list that will involve either a senior prom or
homecoming dance.) If you were to lop off every scene involving telekinesis or Piper Laurie,
I bet I’d still go back to Carrie for stuff like John Travolta and Nancy Allen slapping each
other silly in the car, or for the pioneering brilliance of P.J. Soles, mother of all Valley
Girls (“Get that smirk off your face, Norma”). Brian De Palma even gets away with sticking a
fictional band doing a written-for-the-movie song into the prom scene--they’re more convin-
cingly cheesy than the Feelies in Something Wild.
Travolta, Allen, Soles, and even William Katt are all great--in trying to figure out why Katt
didn’t go on to the kind of career Travolta had, I can only surmise that he (and this may ap-
ply to Amy Irving, too) had a face that was too preternaturally angelic--and so are Laurie
and Betty Buckley. This was Laurie’s first film since The Hustler 15 years earlier--that’s
amazing. (Also a contender for my 50; I went with Hud instead.) Taking nothing away from any
of them, this is still Sissy Spacek’s film. I’ll be seeing Badlands later today, part of a
Malick series at Toronto’s Cinematheque--that and Days of Heaven together, so I may need
electroshock afterwards. I don’t know that moviegoers had ever seen anyone like Spacek when
she came along with Badlands and Carrie in the mid-‘70s. Now and again, she’ll still turn in
performances that make me think she’s the best actress alive: Affliction, The Straight Story,
In the Bedroom. (Most thankless role ever: JFK.) She was never more weirdly affecting than
in Carrie.
Perhaps not surprisingly, YouTube availability pretty much comes down to Carrie’s pyrotech-
nics at the prom (which, truthfully, I’d take over any Hitchcock scene), the coda, or the
trailer. I wish I could link to Travolta and Allen in the car--their back and forth is worthy
of a ‘30s screwball comedy (with Martha & the Vandellas as a bonus). Not to be, so remember:
they’re all going to laugh to you.
#28: Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996)
First words that pop into my mind when I think of Fargo: “Total fuckin’ silence.” Not “yah”
or “Margie,” but “total fuckin’ silence”--like it’s a Bergman tribute or something.
Something I’ve made note of elsewhere: there have been so few films in my life where my
opinion was upgraded drastically over time--if not a full 180, then close enough--that I
can recount them individually. The first instance where I remember this happening was King
of Comedy, which so threw me the first time I detested it; when I took a second look, its
bizarre flatness began to make perfect sense, and it now safely sits in my second tier of
Scorsese favourites. The strongest feeling I took away from my first viewing of Lost in
Translation was tangible disappointment, having loved The Virgin Suicides so much--more
on the both of them later. Took me at least three tries to realize how great Gus Van Sant’s
Elephant is; I went from complaining that the kids were empty abstractions to finding it
hard to imagine how you could render their deaths so movingly if the film had been done
any other way.
I did not initially sign onto the Fargo juggernaut in 1996 (spearheaded by Siskel and Ebert--
when Siskel died, I recall Ebert saying that Fargo encapsulated everything he loved about
movies). There were things I liked about it, but they were brushed aside by the most obvious
of objections: it seemed like a work of telegraphed condescension, and all those “yah”s drove
me right around the bend. At that point in time, there was one Coens film I considered a
masterpiece (Miller’s Crossing--still do), while I was indifferent to the rest of what I’d
seen. Today, Fargo is one of those films that’s like comfort food to me: I watch it once or
twice a year, always when nothing else appeals to me and I just feel like completely losing
myself in something.
I adjusted to the “yah”s, which lifted the veil on something that should have been obvious
from the start: the directors love these characters, especially (of course) Marge Gunderson.
Far from what seemed like a lot of folksy shtick to me at first, I now find myself caught
up in this vast, ominous machine--foreshadowed perfectly by the low-angle shot of the Paul
Bunyan monument early on--that ends in a pitifully sad place: Marge’s uncomprehending “And
for what? For a little bit of money” as she drives the one dumb lunk off to jail, followed
by Jerry Lundegaard’s hapless demise. (A sadness punctuated by the serene coda with Marge
and her husband.)
There’s still one thing about the film I don’t like. Yes--the Mike Yanagita detour. Ebert and
Siskel thought he was one the film’s most miraculous inventions, and I think I can piece to-
gether an argument that someone might make for his centrality. For me, his lunch with Marge
is painfully awkward enough that it’s simply unpleasant to watch; take it away, and I don’t
think you’re left with any less of a film.
I’m very happy that Frances McDormand won the Academy Award; William H. Macy somehow didn’t
(show me the money and all of that), and Steve Buscemi wasn’t even nominated. Ditto Peter
Stormare as Buscemi’s accomplice, but as indicated earlier he doesn’t say a whole lot, not
unless it concerns pancakes.
#27: Broadcast News (James Brooks, 1987)
Give me one minute, please--this is tough.
Jeff has just listed what I’m guessing will be the most demanding film of the 150-minus-
duplications that the three of us end up picking. (Not meant as a value judgement--simply
as a practical matter, a slow-moving, subtitled 15-hour film makes certain demands on you.)
I can’t do any better on that side of the film-going spectrum, not unless I go with Andy
Warhol’s Empire or something like that, so I’ll double back and pick what could well be
the least demanding. If you have no use for it, Broadcast News might be the very defini-
tion of middlebrow (or “midcult,” as Dwight Macdonald called it): an innocuous bit of
fluff with pretensions towards social significance. It recently got a Criterion reissue,
so I guess that bestows upon it some veneer of art. Mind you, you can say the same of
Armageddon and The Blob.
Middlebrow, probably; I’ll instead say it’s standing in here for all those classic screw-
ball comedies like Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey (and His Girl Friday) that I’ve
seen and enjoyed, but which again have faded from view for me. No use for James Brooks’s
As Good as It Gets, and I’ve pretty much forgotten his Terms of Endearment, but Broadcast
News I’ve seen at least 10 times. Yes, I think it’s that good.
If Brooks has a signature style, I wouldn’t know what it is anyway--there’s not a lot going
on in Broadcast News visually or directorially. It’s the three principal performers who
bring me back, Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks especially. Hunter’s Jane Craig (seemingly
modelled on Jane Pauley) is a maniacally intense version of that famous line from the
first Mary Tyler Moore episode, also a Brooks project: “You’ve got spunk.” If you remember
Ed Asner’s comeback, you’ll know that spunk is not necessarily endearing, but Craig’s
perpetual overdrive is mitigated by her habit of blubbering uncontrollably whenever she
stops to catch a breath. Throw in a weirdly appealing accent, and she’s one of my favour-
ite female lead characters ever. Albert Brooks must have had a major hand in the conception
of Aaron Altman; lines like “Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation
made us more attractive?” could be dropped right into Lost in America or Modern Romance.
And William Hurt, an actor I don’t always like, manages a tricky balancing act: he’s re-
quired to be intellectually obtuse enough that he’s always a half-step behind everyone
else, but at the same time sharp enough to use that as a way to manipulate others and ad-
vance his career. (Which brings to mind Alaska for some reason, reminding me that one of
the best jokes in the film involves Alaska.)
There’s so much going on between the three of them, you can mull over or discard the movie’s
big revelation as need be: network news is sometimes more in the business of entertaining
than informing. Network news barely exists in 2011, but in broader outline the issue never
really goes away, witness Anthony Weiner yesterday and whoever grabs our attention tomor-
row. You won’t need Broadcast News to open your eyes to that. (I do, though, like the way
the surprise twist is handled towards the end--it completely caught me off guard the first
time.)
Back on Wednesday. We’ll meet at the place near the thing where we went that time.
#26: Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975)
This should more accurately be placed a little higher on my list, but I've just finished
watching a rental copy, and I want to write about it right away. Like Comfort and Joy,
it's probably about as close as you can get to "not all that easy to see" in this day and
age. (Frederick Wiseman sells expensive copies on his website.) I've seen it three times
now.
If I had to pick one single film to encapsulate (from a distance--I was only a teenager at
the time) my sense of what the mid-'70s felt like, Welfare would be on my short list with
two or three others. What I mean is, my sense of the mid-'70s then was the same as any teen-
ager's would have been, and I was preoccupied with the same things that a teenager would
be preoccupied with today. The lives of welfare recipients were not on that list. But when I
piece the story together retroactively, with an adult's understanding of Nixon's resignation,
the Patty Hearst story, the assassination attempts on Gerald Ford, Ford’s “drop dead” to New
York City, and all the other stuff that was happening at the time, Welfare speaks to all of
that in ways that are amazingly prescient and resonant. Prescient because it was actually
filmed in 1972, before any of that happened; resonant because, in short, it's a cinéma véri-
té plunge into a country on the brink of collapse. You can date the beginning of that col-
lapse to the JFK assassination, escalation in Vietnam, 1968, or wherever you choose, but
Welfare really does feel like the end of the road.
Wiseman famously directs films about social institutions: high schools, hospitals, courts,
boxing gyms, etc. Welfare is exactly as advertised (Wiseman’s knack for intentionally mun-
dane titles is as dryly precise as the Pet Shop Boys'): he takes his camera into a New York
welfare agency, and you spend almost three hours watching people argue, plead, and hiss in-
vective at each other, as clients and agents try to negotiate their way through the Byzantine
rules and regulations that govern eligibility for government assistance. “At each other” is
misleading--most of the time, people talk past each other in Welfare. The clients are caught
in this (the cliché applies) Kafkaesque cycle of getting bounced from government agency to
government agency, and one after another, they seem to be delivering a tale of misery they
know by heart by now. The government employees who try to process them, who try to piece
together their stories and set them straight on what they need to do to get a cheque (or
maybe just an appointment, or something called a “fair hearing”), seem to be asking a lot
of questions that circle around each other and lead nowhere. Nothing much ever seems to get
accomplished. I’ll quote the exact words (dutifully transcribed by yours truly) of a woman
I count as the film’s most unforgettable client, an apoplectic middle-aged black woman with
a weirdly menacing black streak down her forehead. She’s trying to sort out her mother’s
situation:
Welfare Agent: “You’re making it sound like it’s my fault.”
Woman: “It’s not my fault, either. It’s not his [her father’s] fault, he’s in the hospital.
It’s not her [points at her mother] fault, she’s sick. Whose fault is it?”
It’s a question that is never answered in Welfare--and, what’s so perfect about Wiseman’s
technique, I’m not sure the film even tries. Wiseman just recedes into the background and
watches it all happen.
#25: Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
If you haven’t read Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, do so--I think I’d pick it as
my favourite film book not by Kael or Stanley Kauffmann. Great premise: take the five best-
picture nominees from 1967, follow their stories from conception to completion to their
eventual showdown for the hardware, and use that as a window onto profound changes with-
in the industry and within the country at large.
One thing I loved about it is that Harris takes a step back from the ‘70s, the decade that
has forever been my own frame of reference when it comes to movies (and just about every-
thing else, too), and lays the foundation for what was just around the corner. I think it’s
pretty easy to pinpoint the five American films that most built that bridge from ’67 to ’70:
two of them, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, are covered in Harris’s book, while the
other three--Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and Midnight Cowboy--appeared in 1969. Judging
by the name that Steven provided for this group, I’m pretty sure The Wild Bunch will be high
on his list; I’m guessing that Bonnie and Clyde will show up on at least one of Steven’s or
Jeff’s lists; I’d be a little surprised if Easy Rider turns up anywhere. (Unless it already
has with Lost in America.) I like them all to varying degrees, but The Graduate and Midnight
Cowboy are the two from that group that have far and away meant the most to me over the years.
There have been times when I might have listed one or the other as my #1. I don’t have room
for both at this point in the countdown, so Midnight Cowboy it is--or, as John Candy would
have said in Dr. Tongue and Woody Tobias Jr.’s SCTV remake, it’s Midnight Cowboy, y’all.
I get the feeling that The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy haven’t worn nearly as well as Bon-
nie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch among critics. Whereas the latter two seem very modern
today, I’ve seen Nichols’ and Schlesinger’s films dismissed as the work of dilettantes--the
kind of (counter-) cultural artifacts that are too clever, too patronizing, and ultimately
too glib to be taken seriously. Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch helped create the mo-
ment; The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy cashed in on it. (When I make these vague assertions,
trust me that they’re based on rock-solid evidence--there are people out there, and they are
talking.)
I can see some validity to that view. (I’ll leave Benjamin Braddock to his scuba gear and
plastics at this point, and get on with Midnight Cowboy.) When Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman
trip the light fantastic at the film’s big climactic party--“If it’s free, I ain’t steal-
in’”--the walk-on-the-wild-side decadence is pitched so over the top that it seems less like
a Warhol happening than a slightly more drugged-out Laugh-In or Playboy After Dark shindig.
(There’s a Factory party depicted in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol that seems much closer
to the truth; people dance to Motown and the Lovin’ Spoonful, but maybe that’s just the dif-
ference between 1965 and 1969.) And when Schlesinger juxtaposes Voight and Sylvia Miles
going at it with a frenetic television montage of Everything Rotten About America, he may
as well be Stanley Kramer. There are other lapses of heavy-handedness.
So of course I love practically all of it, even the party scene. It’s all window dressing
for Voight and Hoffman. I’m having a hard time thinking of comparable films that are so dom-
inated by two lead actors in quite the same way (I can think of a few where two lead actors
are accessories to the story, but here it’s the other way around). When I see Voight on TV
these days, railing against Obama and carrying water for the Tea Party, I’m baffled and sad-
dened. How do you get from there to here? I’ll stop short of saying that it’s ridiculous they
were both beaten by John Wayne for Best Actor that year, because a) it’s easily explained
(X rating, vote-splitting, and the Lifetime Achievement Award thing), and b) I’ve never seen
True Grit.
I’m not really offering any analysis here...You’ve seen Midnight Cowboy--you don’t need any-
thing from me. I will tell you that my friend Peter and I have been quoting lines to each
other for years. Number-one favourite (must be delivered in weasely high-pitched whine):
“You gotta meet my friend O’Daniel.”
#24: Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2004)
I had planned on reluctantly bypassing this, but last week it was viciously attacked in the
comments section--viciously, I say--and now I have no choice but to put it on my list.
I originally came to Elephant with little interest in Gus Van Sant, and even less in Colum-
bine. There’s a real arbitrariness to the big news stories I get caught up in. I was obsessed
with the O.J. case, but hardly paid attention to Phil Spector or Robert Blake. The Japan
earthquake, the hurricane in Haiti, and even 9/11 felt remote (I know that sounds terrible),
while Katrina couldn’t have felt any more immediate. A few sex scandals I’ve been hugely in-
terested in, most not at all. I don’t know what it is that connects me to some stories while
the rest slip away. As a teacher, especially, Columbine should have felt very close.
There was that barrier to get past, and there was also Van Sant’s methodical, seemingly de-
tached manner of depicting an event that on the face of it suggests exactly the opposite
approach. Instead of chaos, much of the film involves watching kids walk through school
hallways--sometimes the same kids and the same hallways more than once. I mentioned on the
song countdown how integral music is to me when I’m required to have the necessary patience
to watch languorous, long-take filmmaking (Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, etc.). Give me some beauti-
ful music, like the Arvo Pärt song I listed on the countdown, and suddenly Matt Damon driv-
ing a car in the middle of nowhere for six minutes--Gerry, also by Van Sant--is as good as
it gets. But Elephant does not rely on music to do its work; I think there’s some music here
and there, but after seeing the film five or six times, I couldn't tell you a thing about
it.
So the first time I saw Elephant, I had the same reaction that I’ve used to describe other
films that threw me: I knew I’d seen something, I just wasn’t sure what. When I wrote about
it for Scott’s site (listing it as my 6th favourite film of 2003--hey, Steven, I gave it a
6.0!), I hemmed and hawed, praising it for what it wasn’t--sensationalistic, sentimental--
but not quite sure how to address what it was. I thought it came up short on the thing that
mattered most: feeling devastated when kids started getting killed.
Eventually, though, the film’s rhythm made perfect sense. The sheer ordinariness of the world
that the killers shatter is rendered dreamlike by Van Sant, and it slowly draws you in. One
boy snaps pictures in a park, a girl scurries off to her library job, another boy puts up a
front for his girlfriend. There’s one passage around which everything else seems to arrange
itself, and it’s repeated two or three times from different vantage points: the photographer,
the boy, and the girl pass each other in the hallway (the two boys stop and talk for a minute)
as they make their appointed rounds. Once you have a feeling for this world, once you retrieve
it from memory, when the deaths do start coming they’re indeed devastating. Which is why I say
“seemingly detached.”
Two clips, both of which foreground the killers. (Everything that’s prelude to the killings
is lightly represented on YouTube in the way of shorter clips; the whole film seems to be on
there, though.) The first is the massacre--just awful. The other is from a user, a slow-motion
assemblage of bits and pieces set to Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” the Donnie Darko song. I
think it gets at what I love about the film very, very well. Don’t bother with the comments--
I took a look and couldn’t get past the second one.
#23: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)
My 23rd favourite film of all time is Chinatown, making it the first instance during this
countdown where I’ve come up against something that has already been listed (by Jeff at #30).
Based on what’s been revealed so far, this will happen again four more times; as we move
ahead, though, I’m quite sure that number will double or even triple. In most cases, and
especially as we get into our Top 10s, I’ll let my pick stand and do my best to write some-
thing that adds to whatever’s already been written. But with Cuckoo’s Nest and Chinatown, I
feel okay making a one-to-one switch. Because of Jack Nicholson and their close proximity
chronologically, the two films are very much linked together in my mind: not that they’re at
all similar in tone or stylistically, and I’m pretty sure there’s more art in Chinatown, but
I’ve seen each numerous times, and I imagine that at certain points in my life I would have
gone with Cuckoo’s Nest anyway. Best of all, I’m hoping that Jeff and/or Steven have this
slated for their lists, and this time I get to fuck with their heads instead of being the
guy scooped.
Andrew Sullivan does various “watches” on his Daily Dish blog: Cool Ad Watch, Insane Repub-
lican Watch, etc. I should have launched a Films My Friend Peter and I Like to Quote Watch
near the beginning of my list. I mentioned Midnight Cowboy earlier, and there’ve been one
or two others so far. Chinatown’s a key film from our secret shorthand: Peter gravitates
towards Noah Cross (“Just...find the girl”), I can rhyme off lines from Polanski’s “Hey there,
Kitty-Kat” scene or Nicholson and Dunaway outside the restaurant (“I happen to like my
nose...”). Whenever I break out the Nicholson, though, I usually look to Cuckoo’s Nest: “Hit
me, Chief, I’m in the open,” “The mental defective league--in formation,” “'Cause I think
we need to get to the bottom of...R.P. McMurphy.” On Nicholson’s birthday, when I play a clip
for my class, I alternate between the restaurant scene from Five Easy Pieces and the scene
in Cuckoo’s Nest where he fakes catastrophic trauma after his first electro-shock session.
That scene just kills me, especially the little wink at Will Sampson he sneaks in.
Somehow, in a film that is start-to-finish Nicholson’s show, the supporting cast is indeli-
ble. Louise Fletcher so much so that, even though I’m guessing her actual screen time is on
the light side, she won and deserved the Best Actress award that year. That look on her face
at the end of the clip below is one of the film’s great moments. The rest of the patients--
the mental defective league--is an amazingly rag-tag collection of actors who went to bigger
careers, or at least quirky roles in films elsewhere on my list: Danny Devito and Christopher
Lloyd before anybody knew who they were, the poetry teacher from Carrie in the role of Ches-
wick, Mr. Vargas from Fast Times as one of the less communicative patients. And Brad Dourif,
of course, who might be the first person you remember from the film.
I haven’t read Ken Kesey’s book, also famous. This is very unfair, but based on reviews I’ve
read that compare the two, my sense is that I wouldn’t think nearly as highly of the book.
#22: The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)
Later tonight, I’ll attend grad night for the grade 8s at my school. Sheer coincidence--I slot-
ted The Virgin Suicides for #22 about three weeks ago--but this is Prom Film #3 on my list. I
said there’d be five, but I scrapped American Graffiti somewhere along the way. The fourth will
involve not a full-out prom, but something that serves the same function.
I took the time to rewatch The Virgin Suicides over the weekend, and I’ll admit that I’ve had
some second thoughts. It’s such a mood piece, and this time I don’t think I was in exactly the
right one. I also just finished squirming through 140 minutes of The Tree of Life, which must
be one of the biggest hunks of Kael bait I’ve ever seen--it’s not the most opportune moment for
me to be listing something elliptical and self-consciously poetic and so-not-Ridgemont-High.
I considered reverting back to a film I’d dropped earlier on, Rushmore, which appeared almost
simultaneously with The Virgin Suicides and also affected me quite a bit. But I’ll stay with
Coppola’s film, because a) it had already held up over the course of six or seven previous
viewings, and b) even this time, I found the beauty of certain passages as stunning as ever.
And as improbable--I still do not know from what life experiences Coppola was able to conjure
up a world that more or less matches my own romanticized version of the mid-‘70s. She was four
years old at the time.
Well, if you believe one of the boys narrating The Virgin Suicides (which essentially means
If you believe Coppola), it’s because she’s a female--she intuitively understands everything
about me, while I’m forever trying and failing to make sense of her, from the time I’m in grade
school until, presumably, the day I die. I can go with that; I don’t necessarily believe it’s
true, but when I connect with a film on some level that runs deeper than the rational/intellect-
tual, I’m usually okay with whatever it wants me to believe. The adult Trip Fontaine (seemingly
in rehab) thinking back on Lux Libson across the decades: “She was the still point of the turn-
ing world, man.” I think that’s as valid a moment as Mr. Bernstein recalling the young woman on
the ferry in Citizen Kane.
I haven’t read Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel; I’ve come across people who prefer the book, and others
who prefer the film. It’s not difficult to imagine what the book can get at it in more detail
than the film--though all the voice-over narration does try to give some semblance of interior
lives--but the film can give you Todd Rundgren, Carole King, Heart, and others in a way that a
book simply can’t. The clip I’ve linked to is inner-circle hall of fame when it comes to pop
music in movies. What I really took notice of this time around was the scene where Rundgren’s
“A Dream Goes on Forever” plays, the party where the boys get the Down Syndrome kid to do funny,
entertaining things. They mean well. Cecelia quietly leaves the room and kills herself. It’s
such an excruciating scene to watch, you don’t necessarily question the logic of what she does.
Something else I thought of for the very first time (I don’t know why it took me so long to re-
member this): in the mid-‘70s, we had a family of Libson sisters move into the corner house on
my own street. The Martinique sisters, or something like that. They were French-Canadian, there
were four of them, and their age range lined up almost exactly with that of the Libsons. I don’t
think I ever thought of them as the still point of the turning world (that was Nancy Phillips),
but I do know my friend John and I spent a lot of time cycling past their house one summer.
#21: Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994)
I’d have to do some detective work to reconstruct the exact timeline, but I think Crumb was
the film that kicked off a window of 10-plus years where documentaries gradually started to
account for at least half of the new films I saw. There were a few before Crumb that opened my
eyes to how great a doc could be--28 Up and Let’s Get Lost come to mind; The Thin Blue Line
I didn’t care for, and Hoop Dreams took a second viewing--but starting in ’94, the number of
documentaries out there that interested me seemed to multiply exponentially from year to year.
That window hasn’t exactly closed--I’m still seeing a lot of good ones (most recent: Bobby
Fischer Against the World)--but, as Jeff says, a certain predictability of style and tone
crept in somewhere along the way. Just as an example, I wasn’t nearly as big on Inside Job
or Client 9 as everybody else was.
Crumb startled me the first time I saw it, and I still find it fascinating. I knew very lit-
tle about Robert Crumb going in. There was a Toronto outfit called Crazy David’s that used
to sell “Keep on Truckin’” T-shirts back in the ‘70s, and I think I knew that Crumb was
behind those; I’d owned Cheap Thrills for years, and probably knew he’d done the cover; I
hadn’t read a comic book by anyone in years, much less any of his. More often than not, my
favourite documentaries are those where I know very little about the subject matter going
in.
You can approach Crumb from a few different directions. It’s a film about an artist making
art; even though Crumb mostly laughs off any attempts to explain his objectives or themes, he
does, somewhat sheepishly, reveal a lot about what he does and how he does it. More specifi-
cally, Crumb is about “outsider” or “transgressive” art (hate clichés, but sometimes I relent),
with a detour or two into the phenomenon--not exactly new at the time, but newer then than
now--of political correctness; one of the highlights is Robert Hughes practically hissing the
words “Well, what do you do with anybody who doesn’t conform to the standards of Berkeley?”
There’s a little bit about Haight-Ashbury and the hippie moment, even though Crumb is adamant
that he despised all of that--he does tell a funny Janis Joplin story, though.
But more than anything--and why Capturing the Friedmans makes for a perfect set-up--Crumb
chronicles (or maybe, like Capturing the Friedmans, inadvertently stumbles onto) the most
nightmarish family unit imaginable. When I was watching Crumb again last night, I thought of
The Tree of Life. They’d make a weirdly great double-bill; I’ve already made it clear I wasn’t
all that fond of Malick’s film, but if you wanted to set two versions of life in the ‘50s under
a domineering father side-by-side, they’d do nicely. Sean Penn wanders around in The Tree of
Life’s contemporary scenes heavy with memories of his childhood. Next to Charles or Maxon
Crumb, Robert’s two brothers who are so integral to the story Terry Zwigoff tells, Penn is
the very picture of a well-adjusted adult.
I couldn’t find any clips of Charles on YouTube, which is not surprising--it’d be nice to sup-
pose that the sensitivity of YouTube users decided that, but more likely Robert intervened.
Charles is why the film was so startling the first time; he’s quite probably the single most
compelling figure I’ve ever seen in a documentary.
I’ve seen two of the three films Zwigoff’s made since Crumb: Ghost World, which I liked a lot
(had it on my decade-end Top 10), and Art School Confidential, which I thought was pretty good.
When I wrote up the decade-end list, I said I’d make an effort to see Bad Santa. Still haven’t.
#20: No Country for Old Men (Ethan & Joel Coen, 2007)
I’m about 50 pages into Bill James’s Popular Crime. I like this quote from Nate Silver on the
book jacket: “It’s sabermetrics meets the Coen Brothers.” Having once written a sabermetric
defense of Milli Vanilli, I can vouch for the endless flexibility of sabermetrics. (So far the
book has been largely formula-free, but I’ve just gotten to James’s 100-point evidentiary scale
as applied to the Lizzie Borden case, so the math is picking up.)
More than any film I’ve ever seen, I needed a second viewing of No Country for Old Men. (I’m
up to about eight now.) I watched at least three-quarters of the film through splayed fingers
the first time. It wasn’t so much the violence itself, which is both graphic and plentiful--
I’ve seen lots of films that can match No Country in the quantity and ferocity of its violence.
What most unnerved me about Anton Chigurh’s various killings was the sound of that violence;
whether done with that horrific contraption he carries around or by some other means, every act
was accompanied by a loud, sharp, crystalline whoosh or thomp that cut through the silence and
made me jump out of my chair. Didn’t even have to be a killing--as one of the YouTube commen-
tators points out, the phone in the accompanying clip is lethal.
We’re into the Top 20 now, so I wouldn’t be listing No Country for Old Men if its big accom-
plishment was a lot of expertly choreographed violence, even expertly soundtracked violence.
Every third American film since Bonnie and Clyde can lay claim to expertly choreographed viol-
ence, and most of the time I can’t think of anything that causes my mind to shut down quicker.
It’s worth going back to Marge Gunderson’s “And for what? For a little bit of money?” from
Fargo at this point, and also to a line from Kael’s famous Bonnie and Clyde review: “During
the first part of the picture, a woman in my row was gleefully assuring her companions, ‘It’s
a comedy. It’s a comedy.’ After a while, she didn’t say anything.” (I always wonder whether
people like this woman actually existed when I read Kael, but we’ll put that aside.) No Coun-
try for Old Men for me is an incredibly sad film. The world that Tommie Lee Jones’s sheriff is
drawn into is several degrees more brutal and inexplicable than the one that Marge Gunderson
has to contend with. She does solve the case and restores order in the end; Jones is left to
turn his back and walk away, with the suggestion that he’ll be forever revisiting what he’s
just experienced in obscure, fragmentary dreams.
No Country for Old Men was released in close proximity to There Will Be Blood (November of
2007, just under two months earlier than P.T. Anderson’s film, according to IMDB), and the two
are closely connected in my mind. Above all else, and for all their obvious differences, they
both feel like George W. Bush films to me, large-scale reveries in which people get swallowed
up by the landscape and by lawlessness and go a little insane. I know it’s tenuous when you
start linking movies to presidential administrations--J. Hoberman pulls it off in The Dream
Life--but they share a mood that captures the waning months of the W. era well as everything
began to ground down to a halt. I’m about to do something I’ve never done and will never do
again, which is to quote Bruce Springsteen: “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in
this world.”
I’ll mention one caveat about the Chighur character I’ve made before, something that I don’t
think makes him any less of an unforgettable creation: he’s basically an American art-film
version of Freddie Kruger or Jason Voorhees, the indestructible monster that can’t be killed.
(Bardem’s hair belongs in some kind of hall of fame alongside Joe Pesci’s in JFK and Sean
Penn’s in Carlito’s Way.) No slight to Bardem or Jones, but I think the most subtle perfor-
mance in No Country is given by Josh Brolin, who’s got a foot in each of their worlds. He
ended up playing both W. and Dan White within the year; both felt like hollow mimicry.
#19: The Candidate (Michael Ritchie, 1972)
I might be forgetting something, but there are three political films I love. I’ll first quali-
fy that statement the same way I did on the song countdown, which is to say that by political
I mean overtly so, not just in the sense that you can read politics, either a little or a lot,
into most any film if you want to. (And a second qualification: documentaries excluded. The
War Room comes to mind, and there are probably others.)
The first is slated for my Top 10, although it’s really more about journalism than politics.
Not hard to guess what that one is. The second would be Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent,
which I first saw two or three years ago and gets better each time I go back. It’s far from
perfect--it’s got some of that slickness you’d expect from a big-budget early-‘60s film, and
the performances are all over the place--but I find it quite compelling nonetheless. And then
there’s The Candidate. Advise and Consent details the day-to-day maneuvering involved in get-
ting a controversial nomination through the Senate; The Candidate takes a step back and details
the day-to-day maneuvering involved in getting yourself to the Senate in the first place. The
central theme, that getting elected is no different than successfully packaging and marketing
any product, will hardly startle anyone in this day and age, and Michael Ritchie and writer
Jeremy Larner obviously owed a lot to Joe McGinniss’s The Selling of the President 1968, which
got there first. The film didn’t even necessarily startle in 1972; Stanley Kauffmann’s review
basically amounted to “Well done, but tell me something I don’t know.”
Point conceded, to a degree. What continues to amaze me about The Candidate is how unerringly
right every last detail is, and how little has changed in the intervening years. I’ve read the
McGinniss book, and I think The Candidate is a much more atmospheric, meticulous, and free-
wheeling reconstruction of a political campaign. It’s been a while, but McGinniss specifically
focussed on the advertising wing of Nixon’s ’68 campaign, as I recall; that’s only one of many
elements in Ritchie’s film. Especially in 2008, as I obsessed over first the Obama-Clinton con-
test, and then Obama-McCain, things would pop up that seemed right out of The Candidate. One
example among many: when Hillary dismissed Obama’s qualifications at one point with a brusque
“And Senator Obama gave a good speech,” it perfectly matched the Crocker Jarman spot that dis-
misses Robert Redford’s Bill MacKay with a brusque “And what are Bill MacKay’s qualifications?
His father was senator.” So maybe Kauffmann felt the film was yesterday’s news by ’72, but to
me it feels more and more prophetic with each passing year. (Obama. I don’t want to get into a
big political thing here...I get tired of it on the message board...so I’ll just say that it was
a little sobering watching The Candidate again last night at a moment when Obama’s presidency
seems more adrift than ever.)
Kael called Nashville an orgy for movie lovers, so I’ll echo her and call The Candidate an
orgy for political junkies--those like me who are addicted to the drama and the spectacle, not
to the minutiae of policy. The film is an accumulation of great moments out on the trail: a
summit with a labour leader that anticipates the closed-door meeting between Michael and Sena-
tor Geary in Godfather II; some unusable ad footage of Redford trying to interact with over-
wrought mothers at a health clinic (I swear these few seconds planted the idea for Welfare in
Frederick Wiseman’s head, and they also set up my favourite line in the film, Allen Garfield’s
“Grim scene, baby, grim scene”); an editorial from the real Howard K. Smith, who’d do it all
over again in Nashville (and a roving reporter who’s always addressing “Walter” in his spots--
nice touch); a great running joke with a groupie (you can spot her in the accompanying clip);
so forth and so on. And Peter Boyle, who steals the film.
Choosing a clip was easy. If a semi-famous film (at best) can have a famous ending, this is
it--I hear political commentators make reference to it regularly. I especially like how Red-
ford’s question is voiced almost silently the second time.
#18: Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
I’d be overstating it to say I agonized over this choice, but I have spent the last three days
going back and forth in my mind between Rushmore and Boogie Nights. Call it a dead heat for
this spot. I’m still not high enough on my list where the prospect of writing about a film
already listed by Jeff or Stephen--something I have a natural resistance to--becomes unavoid-
able. It will be at a certain point, but I’m not there yet. There was some stuff I wanted to
add to Jeff’s Boogie Nights entry, and I’ll probably go back and do so in the comments. Mean-
while, I think Rushmore is every bit as remarkable, and the two of them are closely linked for
me: within the space of a few months, there were suddenly two guys named Anderson using pop
music in ways that turned my head around more than anything I’d seen since Mean Streets 20
years ago.
I did want to double-check (I’ve watched both way too many times), so I took another look at
Rushmore for the first time in a few years. The film I love has not dimmed. It’s the rare movie
that is a) clearly autobiographical (something underscored by Anderson’s subsequent films), but
b) so fantastical that I look at it and think “Where did he ever come up with this?” I suspect
detractors (and Rushmore definitely has them) experience something close to the same reaction:
“Jesus, what is this?” We more or less mean the same thing, except that I’m awestruck while
detractors are in disbelief.
I wrote a fairly lengthy appreciation of Rushmore that was the first thing I ever posted on
the homepage I’ve been keeping for a decade. Most of the things I singled out then are the
same things I’d single out today, starting with the montage of Max Fischer’s extra-curricular
activities (first time I saw Rushmore, this sequence pulled me into the film’s universe with
such force that I don’t think I questioned a thing the rest of the way), the Who’s “A Quick
One” as Max and Herman Blume wage psychic warfare on each other, and the “I Am Waiting” se-
quence, especially the shot of Margaret Yang peering through the window at Max (an echo of
Chaplin looking at the flower girl at the end of City Lights). In subsequent viewings, my
single favourite moment became one that flashes by in a split second: the look on Bill Mur-
ray’s face when Max says “Mr. Blume, this is my father, Bert Fischer.” I would ask anyone
who thinks of Rushmore as a gimmicky, precocious film to think about those last two. There’s
much about Max that’s unlikeable to the point of being obnoxious, and I don’t think Anderson
tries to gloss over that. In the end, I love the character. Having spend my entire life as
someone who passive-aggressively waits around for people to figure out how I’m feeling about
a certain situation (and who continues to play at this past the point where anybody much
cares anymore), I envy the Max who’s able to blurt out “You hurt my feelings!” in the res-
taurant without worrying about making an idiot of himself. Which he most definitely does.
The backstory about Anderson soliciting Kael to see Rushmore is pretty famous by now. If you
don’t know the details, here they are in Anderson’s own words: According to an interview
Anderson gave with Salon, though, Kael did in fact like Rushmore: “She promoted it a little
bit to other people, that kind of thing. But I also think she thought it was weird. I don't
know if it was really her bag. But she did tell other people to see it and that she liked
it.” Clearly, Wes Anderson cares too much about what Pauline Kael thinks. Clearly, so do I.
#17: The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005)
Strange, unsettling, and a different kind of claustrophobic. Clearly autobiographical, but my
guess is that it’s the kind of autobiography that (unlike Rushmore) invents the bare minimum--
changes someone’s name from Gary to Jerry, makes the next-door neighbour a dentist instead of
a doctor, that kind of thing. But it really does feel like Noah Baumbach is recounting his
upbringing very precisely here.
It’s an upbringing that I half recognize. In broad outline, it couldn’t be more dissimilar to
my own. The two boys here--teenager Walt Berkman (Jesse Eisenberg from The Social Network) and
his younger brother Frank--live in a fairly rarefied world, less economically (although that
too) than culturally. That’s what I mean about fudging the details just enough: the Berkman
parents both write fiction, the mom for The New Yorker, whereas Baumbach’s mom was a film
critic for The Village Voice (Georgia Brown--I think I used check her reviews for a time),
and his dad is listed in Wikipedia as a novelist/film critic. The boys have a private tennis
instructor, their father’s idea of small-talk consists of authoritative dismissals of Dickens
and Fitzgerald--always a big topic of conversation around my own family’s dinner table--and
they just generally comport themselves in the detached, eccentric manner of kids privileged
enough to be a beat or three removed from the mundane concerns of less privileged kids their
age. When their parents split up, they take sides. It’s the world of Wes Anderson and Whit
Stillman--“the upper-class WASPs of the U.S. socio-cultural elite,” Wikipedia calls it, also
linking the three directors together. None of that applies to me.
What I do recognize, though, and what I’m sure most people will recognize, is a family dynamic
where a lot gets left unsaid. It’s a common theme: it’s there in Long Day’s Journey Into Night,
which is great, and it’s there in Ordinary People, which, based on dim memories from 30 years
ago, is ordinary. (Not a film for a 20-year-old, least of all one horrified to see it beat
Raging Bull for best film--I should see it again.) Big things get left unsaid--maybe we should
talk about mom’s morphine addiction--and little things. One by one they accumulate, and after
a while everyone knows the trap doors. When someone opens one up accidentally, or with the in-
tent of antagonizing someone else--The Squid and the Whale is very much about those deliberate
acts of provocation--the carefully constructed house of cards starts to teeter. In the Berkman
family, everything pivots off the father. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered another cinematic
father like the one Jeff Daniels creates here. To say he takes up a lot of oxygen would miss
the mark significantly. There is no oxygen when he’s around. Maybe that’s why the younger
Berkman son seems beyond just detached and eccentric at times. It’s more like he’s brain-
damaged.
I don’t know where Daniels’ frightening performance comes from--prior to this, he was just
the genial doofus in Something Wild to me. Laura Linney is as real as the mother as she was
in You Can Count on Me. Seems like I’ve seen a lot of memorably weird kids in American movies
the past decade, and Eisenberg and Owen Kline would head the list. I like The Social Network
a lot, but the strength of Eisenberg’s performance in The Squid and the Whale creates some
interference for me.
Here’s the final scene, one of the most elliptically perfect I’ve ever seen. The movie follows
with Bert Jansch’s “Counting Blues” over the end credits, something I wrote about in the song
countdown (Jansch’s “Running from Home” was my #4--I may still have never heard it if not for
Baumbach). I’ll repeat the key line from “Counting Blues” here: “Don’t be afraid.”
#16: To Sir with Love (James Clavell, 1967)
I had something really Sight & Soundy slated for #16, but I’ve flip-flopped a couple of picks
so I can bring Steven and Jeff's canonical reign of terror to a momentary end. Be forewarned:
I’m a great believer in the infinite powers of nostalgia, and can be very protective about the
most cherished objects of my misty-eyed reveries, so if you’re someone who dismisses such a
mindset--not naming any names here--just take three steps back and be very, very careful.
I mentioned Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution earlier, in conjunction with Midnight Cow-
boy. The not-so-secret star of the book is Sidney Poitier. He made three hugely successful
films in 1967, two of which vied, deservedly or not, for Best Picture, and inadvertently found
himself caught up squarely in the politics of the day. As cities rioted, he was #1 on the list
of 1968 box-office stars (#7 on the ’67 list--there must be a year lag in measuring that). All
three of his ’67 films put race front and center--pretty much impossible not to at the time if
your lead actor was African-American. (Even in Night of the Living Dead a year later, race is
weirdly front and center because of George Romero’s inspired decision to avoid any mention or
even awareness that his lead character happened to be African-American.) American film in 1967
meant Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Sidney Poitier.
A brief word on the other two Poitier films that year. I don’t know that anyone would argue
for In the Heat of the Night as being great art, but it’s well done, and watching Poitier and
Steiger go at it is very entertaining. I think Poitier should have won Best Actor that year
for the sum of his performances, but Steiger was otherwise a fine choice. As for Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner, well, it’s not without merit, and not as hopelessly dated as you might ex-
pect. That’s about the best I can say--it’s been a while since I last saw it.
To Sir with Love was the least consequential of the three at the time, and has probably been
seen by far fewer people (although it’s hardly obscure--I find that most people anywhere close
to my own age have seen it). If you’re puzzled by my inclusion of it here, you likely find it
no less cloying, sentimental, or naïve than Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. And indeed, Sarris
simultaneously praises and dismisses it as “super-Kramer” in The American Cinema.
Where to begin conveying what I love about it? I’m sure every teacher can point to a film or
two as the idealization of what kind of teacher you want to be and too rarely are. Mine is
split between a few films (there’s even a part of me that likes being the supercilious Kings-
field in The Paper Chase), but To Sir with Love wins that one walking away. Ending up as a
teacher wasn’t even on my radar through my 20s (I remember ridiculing a friend who went
straight from university to teachers college), but when I did finally apply at the age of
28, I know that somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind was the moment in To Sir with
Love when Poitier turns the corner on the final day, pauses, and there’s everyone all lined
up looking as angelic as can be. Once Poitier gets past the moment early in the film when he
justifiably flips out and has the (convenient, yes) light bulb go off in his head as to how
he needs to handle the class, he’s a model of temperance, good judgement, and deep concern
the rest of the way. I have my moments where I stumble onto one or another of those elevated
states of being, but mostly I’m just making it up blindly as I go along, so I really fall
for that part of the movie.
The rest of my attachment is where nostalgia takes over. I saw To Sir with Love at a very
young age (probably at a drive-in), and the music, the dinginess of East London, Judy Geeson
and Lulu, Christian Roberts as Brando/Dean, the period details, the incredible field trip to
the museum, Poitier’s dramatic gesture at the end, it all made a deep impression on me. The
clip below, Poitier and Geeson dancing to “It’s Getting Harder All the Time” at the gradua-
tion party, is in the running for my single favourite scene ever. I even love how it subverts
one of the polite racial stereotypes of its day: as Poitier lurches around preposterously,
Geeson turns out to be a fantastic dancer. Actually, I’d say that To Sir with Love is more
nuanced in its treatment of race than In the Heat of the Night. The crotchety old teacher
who baits Poitier casually slips in a couple of especially venal lines.
Remember now: be very, very careful. (Wish I could link to the SCTV parody with Bob Geldof,
but nothing on YouTube.)