If he hadn’t died of a drug overdose outside a West Hollywood nightclub at the tragically young age of 23, River Phoenix would have turned 40 this week. He may not carry the iconic weight of an actor like James Dean who also died much too early, but for my generation, he was just as important.
Phoenix was around the same age as me and I grew up watching him in his early roles like Explorers and Stand By Me. Even as a child actor, it was easy to see that he stood out. There was a purity to him; an honesty that made him seem mature beyond his years. When I think of Phoenix, I remember the great director Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon) talking about a particular experience directing Phoenix in Running On Empty which captures these qualities:
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The L.A. County Museum of Art kicked off a month-long tribute to the American comedies of director/producer Ernst Lubitsch on Friday night with the 1932 classic Trouble In Paradise (see full schedule here). Lubitsch’s name may not be as recognized today as other Golden Age directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder, but his influence was massive.
Lubitsch was the filmmaker’s filmmaker. He was the one cinematic giants like Orson Welles, John Ford and Francois Truffaut revered. “The Lubitsch Touch,” as his directing style came to be known, was often imitated but never equaled. The great French filmmaker Jean Renoir said that “Lubitsch invented the modern Hollywood.” Billy Wilder (who co-wrote several films for Lubitsch and considered him his mentor) had a sign over his desk that read “What would Lubitsch do.” During the times I spent with Wilder, whenever he would get cranky or clam up, all I had to do was ask about Lubitsch and his face would light up and I’d get a flood of great stories and filmmaking advice. Cameron Crowe called his film Jerry Maguire his tribute to “the Lubitsch Touch.” When the New York Times Magazine brought Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese together to discuss films in a historic November 1997 interview and the topic turned to the great directors, the first name that popped up was Ernst Lubitsch (Allen: “Whenever people ask me about comic directors, I would have to say Ernst Lubitsch is the best one I’ve ever seen.” Scorsese: “Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than another director could with an open fly.”). Read more...
In honor of Father’s Day, I wanted to write about my favorite cinematic dad. The problem with picking a favorite or “the best” is that it’s always tough to narrow the choice down to one. So let me acknowledge the other dads that made my short list: Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Christopher Walken in At Close Range, Spencer Tracy in Father of the Bride, Choi Min Sik in Oldboy and Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer. All great performances and all great films worth checking out if you haven’t seen them.
But if I have to pick one and only one favorite father, it has to be the late, great Charles Chaplin in The Kid.
Released in 1921, The Kid was Chaplin’s first feature-length film. At the time, most comedies were shorts mostly consisting of gags with the barest of stories holding them together so many in Hollywood thought Chaplin was crazy to even attempt to make a feature-length comedy. However, the movie turned out to be a huge hit—both at the box office and with the critics–and paved the way for even more ambitious films like Modern Times and City Lights. Read more...
Being somewhat of a cinephile, people expect a certain type of response from me to the question of: what movie(s) changed your life? I know I’m supposed to answer something like Citizen Kane or a French New Wave title, but the films that have a profound effect on your life are not necessarily the ones that might be considered the great works of cinema. In fact, the movies that may mean most to you personally may be those that some might consider, well…to be bad. But that’s the way it should be. Movies are about an emotional response and we all respond differently. Besides, I personally prefer the Orson Welles of Touch of Evil over Citizen Kane and I don’t think Godard’s made a good film since Contempt. So there!
So with that in mind, today I’d like to discuss three films that changed my life; each in a different way. But they all have a couple of things in common: they all came out in the 1980s when I was at exactly the right impressionable age to be effected by them and they’re largely forgotten today (these were all critical and/or box office failures when they were first released). But they provided me with important lessons that still resonate with me to this day.
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The name Dede Allen will probably mean nothing to most of our readers, but she was just as integral to the movement that revolutionized Hollywood in the late 60s/70s as her more famous filmmaking peers like Warren Beatty, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. Allen was a film editor and in my humble opinion, the best editor of the last forty or some odd years. Her credits include such classics as The Hustler, Bonnie And Clyde, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Reds and Wonder Boys. Allen passed away last Saturday at age 86 after suffering a stroke so this seems as good a time as any for me to honor her legacy.
Like many in my generation, I was first introduced to Allen’s work through the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. It may seem strange that someone like Allen, who was associated with the type of adult dramas that won Oscars, would work on a teen flick, but Breakfast Club producer Ned Tanen knew that he needed someone of her stature considering this was going to be a film that was going to mostly take place in one location (a high school library) and be directed by a novice (Hughes sole previous directing credit was Sixteen Candles and it had yet to be released). Here’s what Tanen says on this subject in the book You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried:
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My fellow Offenders Iris and Elaine have been blogging this month about the films they think should have been nominated for Oscars (see examples here, here and here). Of course there were also many deserving individuals who never won the gold statuette and I think none of the “losers” were more deserving than director Alfred Hitchcock. Known as the “Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock helmed such classic thrillers as Notorious, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Rope, The Birds and, of course, Psycho.
In fact, the shower-murder scene in Psycho may not only be the most famous sequence in all of Hitchcock’s films, but one of the most famous in all of cinema. In an era of extreme horror films like the Saw series, this scene may no longer have the same power to shock audiences like it did when it was released in 1960, but it still retains its power 50 years later. Hitchcock should have won a directing Academy Award for this sequence alone. But since he didn’t, I’d like to pay homage to it as part of our Oscar “flavah of the week” by examining what makes Psycho’s shower-murder one of the most effective moments to ever be captured on celluloid. Read more...
When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced last July that it would suspend its film screening series due to a shortage of funds, there was a huge outcry from cinephiles all over L.A. and beyond. One of the loudest (and most prestigious) voices leading the charge was director Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, The Departed) who penned an eloquent letter to the museum which was printed in the L.A. Times shortly after the bombshell announcement (read it here). For now, the museum will continue to screen films until at least June though the future looks uncertain beyond that.
But Scorsese himself sat down with LACMA’s Michael Govan last Wednesday in the museum’s Bing Theater in front of a packed house to discuss the importance of LACMA’s film programs and of film preservation in general. I was lucky to have been able to snag a ticket to the event (you can read a full account of the evening here). Both LACMA and Scorsese have played a vital part in nurturing my love affair with film so for what it’s worth, I want to share some personal thoughts on this subject. Read more...
The conflict between art and commerce has been a part of the filmmaking process from the moment the first moving images were committed to celluloid. Because the medium is a very expensive one, oftentimes commerce wins out when these two factors come to a head so I’m always impressed with filmmakers who are able to make big budget commercial movies that are also deeply personal. One director who consistently managed to do this was Douglas Sirk and one of his most personal films was the 1958 World War II story A Time To Love And A Time To Die.
Sirk was best known for his glossy melodramas set in the world of upper class WASPs and featuring major stars of the period like Rock Hudson and Lana Turner. He made classic films like All That Heaven Allows and Imitation Of Life that felt like your typical Hollywood entertainments, but were really subversive critiques of a seemingly perfect America that was hiding a darkness just below the surface. Todd Haynes’ masterpiece Far From Heaven was a tribute to Sirk from its visual style to its themes, characters and even use of music. Read more...
My fellow Offender Alfredo recently wrote about how Jaws is one of his favorite “comfort food” flicks—those movies you can watch over and over and never get tired of. Many of my comfort food flicks come from the 1980s—the decade when I was an impressionable, young kid discovering movies for the first time. I think many of my choices—the Indiana Jones trilogy, John Hughes high school films and Ghostbusters—still hold up. So instead I’m going to write about some of my true comfort food flicks—these are the films that if I saw for the first time today, I’d probably think were god-awful (with one exception below) but because I discovered them at just the right time in my life, I’ll always love them. In no particular order:
HOWARD THE DUCK (1986)
Along with Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate, this George Lucas-produced big-screen adaptation of the classic Marvel Comics character became synonymous with the word “bomb” in the ‘80s. I’ll admit the film has its share of problems including a main character who looks exactly like what he was—a short dude in a duck costume—but there’s one reason I saw this movie at least half a dozen times when it came out…Lea Thompson:
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One of my favorite films is Jacques Demy’s 1964 French New Wave musical The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg. I try to watch it every year around this time. I think my favorite opening title sequence of any film is from this movie, largely in part to the beautiful score by Michel Legrand. Check it out below and if you haven’t seen the film, go out and rent it now!
Of the holy trinity of American holidays—Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas—Thanksgiving has tended to get the short end of the stick when it comes to films. I dug Jodie Foster’s Home For Holidays and look forward to Eli Roth’s upcoming full-length feature version of Thanksgiving, but my favorite Thanksgiving movie to date has to be the late John Hughes’ 1987 comedy classic Planes, Trains And Automobiles.
Starring two of Hollywood’s finest comedic actors at the height of their powers—Steve Martin and the late, great John Candy—the film is a mismatched buddy comedy about an uptight advertising executive played by Martin who only wants to get home to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving but is foiled at every turn by circumstances beyond his control. To make matters worse, fate has forced him to travel with Candy’s annoying shower ring salesman. Read more...
By 1958, Orson Welles’ career as a filmmaker in Hollywood was pretty much over. After making a splash at the ripe age of 25 with his debut film Citizen Kane (still considered by many to be the apex of cinematic achievement), Welles soon gained a reputation for being difficult and was shunned.
But when Charlton Heston, who was about to star in Universal’s new thriller Touch of Evil, insisted that he would do the film only with Welles at the helm, the studio relented. Welles again proved to be a handful and the studio took him off the project during post-production and re-edited the film without his input. Read more...
Another entry in my month-long celebration of all things Halloween
I’ve written previously about my love for horror flicks. I grew up on them and my childhood is filled with many pleasant memories of sitting in front of the TV and watching everything from the old Universal monster movies (the classics—Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman) to things like Poltergeist which seriously fucked me up. But I have a special place in my heart for the ones from Asia.
It’s not necessarily because I’m Asian (though that may play a small part in it), but I think it has more to do with the fact that a lot of these genre works from Asia are truly bizarre and have a very distinct sensibility that I can only describe as…different. Read more...
Another entry in my month-long celebration of all things Halloween
As a kid, I knew Halloween was right around the corner when KTLA (channel 5 in L.A.) would run the 1967 stop-motion animation classic Mad Monster Party during the Weekend Film Festival hosted by Tom Hatten.
The film was made by the team of Rankin-Bass who were also responsible for those cool stop-motion animated Christmas specials like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. As much as I loved those, Mad Monster Party was my favorite and I watched it religiously every time it was on. What made it so awesome was how the filmmakers were able to work all the best monsters—Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, etc…–into one story. Read more...
I can’t say I was a big fan of musicals as a kid. As a red-blooded heterosexual boy, they seemed a little, well, “gay.” But then I discovered the films of Gene Kelly. He was different from the other musical stars I was familiar with. Not only could he sing, dance and act with the best of them, but he was a real man’s man. He was athletic, masculine and seemed like one of the boys. If someone like Fred Astaire (whom I also think is awesome) was refined and upper-class, Kelly was the man of the people. Coming from a working-class background, I could identify with him on a personal level. For those unfamiliar with this amazing artist, check out this segment where actor Christopher Walken talks about what made Kelly great: Read more...
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in Shampoo
This is a new feature I’m starting up. In each blog of this series, I’m going to write about one thing that I love about the movies. Sometimes it may be a personal essay like this first entry and other times it may just be a posted clip from some film that I love, but the idea is that I will keep this going until I literally have written 1,001 entries. Why–you may be asking (or not)? Because I have had a life-long affair with the movies and what better way to share how I feel than to write 1,001 love letters to something that has consistently provided me with joy and inspiration from the very first moment I sat in a darkened theater and discovered the love of my life. Read more...
