33 rebellions per minute
"It's like Ally Sheedy says she's the protagonist in your head"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
There is a simple reason why I write music reviews instead of movie reviews. See, it's likely that I know more about (other people's) music than you do, even assuming you know a lot. Whereas I know less about movies than you do, even assuming you are deaf and blind and reading my journal by the most sophisticated touch-screen technology. It makes a difference.
But I still, sometimes, love movies. Here, then, is an arbitrary, annotated list of my favorites. If your favorite movie isn't on the list, that's ok; I probably haven't seen it.
BRIAN'S FAVORITE MOVIES SINCE 1880
1. Labyrinth. I wasn't particularly given a choice about being a Jim Henson fan. My Mom never said, as she did about me and books, that if I didn't love Jim Henson and his various Muppet-and-beyond projects, she'd've been forced to drown me in the Mississippi River. But the undertones of that were already clear, and by age five I obediently had a latency-period crush on Janice, guitarist in Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. So you may assume my bias; fine. I think Labyrinth is brilliant in any number of ways. As a coming-of-age responsibility tale, told in puzzle-game terms simple enough to fascinate kids and just puzzling enough to make an adult pause too. As a masterful display of sophisticated puppetry and good reading-aloud monster voices. As a loving homage to a dozen or more great children's books. As a rock video collection for which David Bowie penned his best songs in 13 years. Admittedly, every girl I care about thinks Jennifer Connelly's character was an idiot to pass up the chance to hang around and sleep with Bowie the goblin king. But they love the movie as much as I do, and a movie that's equally brilliant by multiple conflicting interpretations is, by clear assumption, brilliant.
2. Dead Poets' Society. I want to teach for a living. This movie is not the reason why, but it is a quick, handy demonstration. Made when Robin Williams was still funny, and still capable of delivering disrespectful lessons ("what is it that motivates a poet to write? The desire to _woo women_") -- but with obvious love. I completely buy his character as a life-transforming teacher. Irony is a powerful tool for any teacher, and drama is virtually required, as is empathy for teenage melodrama. That said, the shot after Williams's character is replaced -- where half the class rebelliously stands on their desks, defying the new teacher, and half sits quietly with looks of deep puzzlement -- earns the movie half-a-dozen ranks on its own. Sometimes truth requires a conscious flinch reaction, and those are so hard to get permission to stage.
3. Little Shop of Horrors. The Frank Oz musical version, which doubles as the coolest musical ever recorded. Nerdy guy romances nerdy girl by breaking into song at crucial moments; the inherent sado-masochism of dentistry is toyed with; Petula Clark's "Downtown" is recast for the post-Reagan definition of the term; and the earth is threatened by a rockin' "mean green mother from outer space" plant. A moral lesson on why nurturing the weak is a dangerous practice. I suppose I should oppose that. Oh well.
4. Drowning By Numbers. As if Kafka's the Trial, where paranoia merges surrealy into an almost willful, pointlessly noble fatalism, was re-cast as a love story by Umberto Eco. Layered, mystifying, and stealing human empathy for a universe that, by all rights, should have no place for it.
5. Lawn Dogs. This love story, platonic although suppressedly erotic, is between a 10-year-old girl in a gated community, raised by the sorts of parents who would choose to live in a gated community, and the 20-something man who mows their lawn. Nothing at all like Lolita, thank you -- where Lolita was a passive object of Humbert's, Devon (played by the talented and soon-to-be-ravishing Mischa Barton) is the romance's instigator, her genuine love for Trent springing out of an initial desperate need to learn what the liberation of unsafety is like. The story doubles as a parable of the class war, reminding us who the aggressors are, but it's also, quite simply, the best love story I've seen in movie form.
6. Stand By Me. Captures the rhythm of the classic American childhood where danger is a collective boys-will-be-boys choice -- but where danger has the distressing tendency to be dangerous, even if that interrupts the funniest teen-grossout bits.
7. Revenge of the Nerds /// From the Hip. Despite vague nods in favor of realism, these movies -- one a battle over college popularity, one a courtroom social-justice tale -- are fables. Cleverness defeats mindless traditionalism, social conscience defeats meaningless cruelty, nerds prove to be good in bed, and The Establishment is so disconcerted by the explosive mixture of logic and anarchy that it is forced to surrender, shamefaced. Both movies are funny and spot-on inventive, and both movies pull out the righteous rhetorical stops at just the right moment with enough style to carry it off, such that not only does any reasonable viewer put off the "yeah, right" until it's over, but I, for one, don't even insert that later, whatever I might think I know. Every world needs heroes.
8. Heavenly Creatures /// River's Edge. On the other hand, movies inspired by real-life, seemingly senseless murders can be just as cool. Heavenly Creatures is my second-favorite romance movie, a lesbian schoolgirl romance conducted in a fever of creative intensity and labyrinthine fantasy, heated beyond the breaking point by an oppessive, uncomprehending adult world that -- the movie is balanced enough to make this clear -- had a lot to legitimately feel worriedly oppressive about. River's Edge is set a mere 25 years later, which nonetheless leaves enough time for anarchy, not stultification, to have become the trigger. A boy strangles his girlfriend because he can, and their mutual friends instinctively side -- at first -- with the one who's still alive and able to solicit their sympathy. It's a hard pose to try and break.
9. The Dark Crystal. More Henson. The most beautiful movie ever made. The moral dichotomy of good-and-evil is as straightforward, as unsubtle, as the religious text of your choice. But the mythology is still worked out intricately enough for an obsessive, the costumes bear all the weight of solemnity or cruelty or cunning assigned to the actors inside, Kira is still a winsome little smart-alec, Mother Nature is as much a comic as She is a vicious doublecrossing bitch, and I want to own that orrery (3-D model of the complex star-and-planet system) for my own.
10. Heathers. I didn't think it was quite as funny or true as some people did, probably because I liked high school (and was lucky enough to get along fairly well with all the cliques). Plus, as a music geek, I refuse to accept that "Teenage Suicide" song as a hit, even for fiction purposes. But given how obsessed a lot of smart people are with Heathers, that's just why it's not my #1 or #2 or something. Revenge of the Nerds's fantasy depends on shallow emotions and plastic motives; real life revenge, being far harder to achieve, can turn much nastier. I suppose this counts among my favorite love stories too, Winona Ryder at her most beautiful and the James Dean stand-in. Love can warp people. You gonna doubt that?
11. The Crush /// The Cable Guy. Two stalker movies with disturbingly near-likeable stalkers: larger-than-life lessons in the fact that your own behavior towards the convenient-to-reject can be the difference between having a best friend and a worst enemy, granting that the best friend, at any rate, would be deeply unstable. Alicia Silverstone's character, gorgeous and desireable, rejected only because she is the 14-year-old daughter of her Crush's employer and landlord, is relatively shallow, but pursues her goals with persuasive quick-change attitude and reckless inventiveness; the plot is tight and tense, and the acting by the entire ensemble, even the minor players, is superb. (It doesn't hurt that I get to spend most of the movie staring at Alicia Silverstone, of course). Jim Carrey, on the other hand, absolutely dominates Cable Guy, a movie that depends on him and gets away with it. He is lonely and needs a friend, and no-one wants to befriend anyone who's lonely and needs a friend -- a rich-get-richer poor-get-poorer dilemma which defined large portions of my life, thank you very much. Pushing into Matthew Broderick's life like a psychotic Cat In The Hat, he manages to conduct an ingenious nightmare with full pathos and tossed-off shards of right-on social commentary. Although basically, I just like good stalker movies, I guess.
12. Deathtrap /// FX. I also just like thrillers of the sort where the viewer's perspective on what the blazes is going on changes every ten or fifteen minutes, and where every twist still sells itself as, THIS time, the honest-to-goodness truth. Tense, disorienting 100% fun.
13. Fail-Safe. Tense and disorienting movies can, sometimes, survive even when you know what's going on, or think you do. I'm old enough (barely) to remember the threat of being instantly vaporized by the thousands of missiles that were built to protect us from missile launches, which this 1961 movie captures perfectly. I'm not old enough to remember when the natural response to the forthcoming end of the world was not to spend the last six hours partying or snogging (cf. Last Night, 1999), but to try to prevent the world's ending. This movie, being old, doesn't care how odd that seems. And its ending remains as shocking -- and right -- as ever.
14. What's Up, Doc? I know it's a sign that I grew up backwards, but for me, the definitive screwball comedy -- a light romantic genre filled with plot twists, deboinaire heroes, chaos-creating heroines, and high-class banter -- came almost 30 years after everyone had stopped making them. Not to suggest that Barbara Streisand is BETTER than the Hepburns (ahem, ahem), but for one movie I was ready to fall in love with her. Then we learned better, but the jokes are still funny, and the car chase scene almost makes up for every bad car chase scene in movie history at once.
15. BASEketball /// Very Bad Things. I've included some badly reviewed movies here, at the #7 and #11 slots, and that's fine. I am right; the critics are wrong, because they evaluated those movies on aesthetic criteria that had nothing to do with what the movies were trying to accomplish. BASEketball and Very Bad Things, though, are terrible on their own terms, and it's preposterous for me to list them when I can't even find room for The Hudsucker Proxy or Cobb or Class Action or The Princess Bride or The Muppet Movie or The World According To Garp, all of which are exceptionally well-made. BASEketball is supposed to be a comedy, but it's hormonal and adolescent and snickering in an insufficiently clever way and has exactly three jokes I found funny; plus the plot depends on the founders showing off a sport that makes them look like total jerks, then three months later the sport is a hit with the same people they embarrassed themselves in front of, then five years later the sport is a national phenomenon, despite which no one except its founders is even remotely competent at it. Very Bad Things can't decide if it's a drama, a thriller, or a tasteless comedy, plus it has a role for Cameron Diaz, who is certainly one of the worst actresses in the world.
But I'm not kidding. BASEketball has only three funny jokes, two of which are the same one in different contexts, but they're profound ones (two about the inherent absurdity of adopting some mass media outpouring for private meaning, one -- a passionate plot-turning moral argument, superbly acted, consisting entirely of the word "Dude!" -- the most memorable demonstration I've seen of the superfluity of words in a close friendship). And the story, if you airbrush all the offensive parts and don't worry about why the completely unbelievable parts are completely unbelievable, and focus simply on the fact that there ARE some individually powerful scenes, provides some of the most subversively empathetic stories and morals this side of the New Testament, including an all-but-explicit endorsement of communism. As for Very Bad Things: it starts out as a story about the tension and explosive reserves of potential energy involved in entering a marriage in which one is about to give up all relationship power (the scene with Cameron Diaz carefully arranging all the husband/groomsman suits to the most precise detail reminded me chillingly enough of the girl I was dating that I easily forgave Cameron's Cameron-ness). It evolves into a movie, like River's Edge, about how friends react when one of them does something terribly wrong (murder). From there it becomes an increasingly silly parable about a perfectly serious point known by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as "defining deviancy down" -- the way that unacceptable actions become acceptable or even logical as a reaction to what other people are doing. And from one angle the movie's terminal short attention span and bad taste ruins it, all these stories. But from another, the fact remains that the movie got me thinking, successfully, about all of these topics, and remembering the movie's scenes as potent touchstones a year later. That's a feat.
It is too easy, I think, to grade movies or any artworks by their plusses AND their minuses. That's lazy. Any movie that doesn't last in your head beyond its two-hour running time has no business going on your Greats List anyway. Once the projector is stopped, the movie is yours to play with as you choose. Let what's right about the movie capture your imagination. Learn from it. To some degree, of course, I love these two bad movies because they helped teach me the artistic lesson that I now use to justify them. That's circular; fine. But I didn't make their power over me up. All I made up was a system by which you might manage to be affected, too.
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