[Elliot]
This is a great litmus test, if only because my opinions on my favorite films by specific directors are much stronger and more unwavering than my favorite movies, which can change by the month if not the week. Asterisks denote directors from whom I haven’t seen the whole, um, oeuvre:
Joel Coen: Blood Simple
Wes Anderson: The Royal Tenenbaums
*Hal Ashby: Being There
*Kevin Smith: Clerks
Quentin Tarantino: Kill Bill Volume 1
Stanley Kubrick: Lolita. Yes, Lolita.
P.T. Anderson: Punch-Drunk Love
*Errol Morris: Vernon, Florida
*David Cronenberg: A History of Violence
*David Lynch: The Elephant Man
*Pedro Almodovar: Hable con Ella (Talk to Her)
[Eitan]
By way of Jason Kottke, a film personality test:
Ben Tesch proposes the following personality test:
What I find most interesting is which movie people consider the best movie from a particular director, as it is usually very telling and polarizing in a different way, so to this point I will propose a new personality test where you reblog your favorite movie from each of these directors:
1. Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc
2. Wes Anderson: The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tennenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, etc
3. Hal Ashby: Being There, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, etc
4. Kevin Smith: Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks, etc
5. Quentin Tarantino: Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etcI would also personally throw in:
6. Stanley Kubrick: 2001, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, etc.
7. P.T. Anderson: Boogie Nights, Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia.
8. Errol Morris: The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Mr. Death, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Gates of Heaven, etc.
I’m an ORHMCKB2SBF — O Brother Where Art Thou?, Rushmore, Harold and Maude, Clerks, Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Shining, Boogie Nights, and the Fog of War. As far as just selecting a chunk of directors and running with it, you probably couldn’t pick a bunch that is as accessible, while also saying so much about the person. Four of these movies — O Brother, The Shining, Boogie Nights, and the Fog of War — are among my 25 or 30 all-time favorites.
For the sake of fun, I would throw in Cronenberg, Lynch, and Almodovar. (I’ll go for Videodrome, Blue Velvet, and All About My Mother.)
Filed under: Classic Cinema, Commentary, Directors | Tags: Annie Hall, Manhattan, New York movies, The Cruise
Manhattan‘s opening is of course wonderful, though as you said the film that follows leaves much to be desired. And thank you for mentioning Annie Hall! When I was thinking of my response to your Best Openings post, Annie Hall came immediately to mind, but when I went to type it up it somehow got lost. Woody’s monologue perfectly sets the stage for the personal, bittersweet story to follow, one that isn’t afraid to break all the rules of filmic storytelling (the fourth wall being just the first). I flipped through a draft of the Annie Hall screenplay a couple of years ago, and was surprised to see that the opening monologue had been written just as a series of ideas, some of which made it into the final cut and some of which didn’t. My impression is that at least part of that opening scene was improvised. As far as New York movies go, however, I think Annie Hall captures L.A. far better than it does the Big Apple.
Your “New York Movies” list is a pretty solid one, but for my money the movie that captures New York City the best is one that neither you nor most people have ever seen. The Cruise has been making the rounds on the film-geek circuit for years now.
The Cruise (1998)
A documentary directed by Bennett Miller, who went on to an Oscar nomination for his sophomore effort, Capote, The Cruise follows New York City tour guide and Manhattan island celebrity Timothy “Speed” Levitch as he leads tours of the mythical city by day, and lives the grungier life of a typical New Yorker by night. Shot in Manhattan‘s black and white (albeit on a digital camera), The Cruise finds moments in the city, through Speed’s eyes, that no tourist ever could. On his tour bus, Speed points out the Chrysler Building (he sardonically quotes Lewis Mumford’s description of its crest as “uninspired voluptuousness”) and other classic landmarks (“if architecture is the history of all phallic emotion, the Empire State Building is utter catharsis”). At night, a mere man-on-the-street, he gestures toward the jail where he did a brief stint for some civil disobedience, and guides us through the friend’s apartment where he has been sleeping for lack of a home. I first watched The Cruise last summer after my third week or so of living in Manhattan, and already I suspected it was the most accurate portrait of the city imaginable. As the months went on, every experience I had in the city only confirmed my suspicion. Manhattan and Do the Right Thing may top every top-ten list, but for me The Cruise is unbeatable.
Filed under: Classic Cinema, Commentary, Directors | Tags: Annie Hall, Manhattan, New York City, Opening Scenes, Woody Allen
Interestingly enough, one of my all-time favorite opening scenes comes from a movie whose antecedent 90 minutes are among my all-time least favorite: Manhattan.
Woody Allen has always been the king of the pitch-perfect opening scene. Witness Annie Hall‘s stark, self-deprecating minimalism:
On one hand, it’s a flawless and instant introduction to Alvy Singer, but it also performs another important task by establishing a sort of table of contents for the film that is to follow. The structure of the entire film is dictated by these first 90 seconds or so, and you can already map out the way the conflicts and ideas are going to play out. People often criticize Woody Allen for always playing himself, but ironically enough, the film in which he plays himself with the greatest transparency and precision is also by far his best film and his best performance.
As an opening scene, this works because it is measures out the distance we need to use to separate ourselves from the action of the film: he breaks the fourth wall and invites us in, but we mustn’t come too close because we should constantly be aware that this is an artifice so clever that we can hardly tell the difference between the storyteller on one side of the camera and the storyteller on the other side.
The opening scene in Manhattan is charmingly self-referential. Allen pokes fun at the idealization of black and white Manhattan, while giving us the transcendently beautiful Konigsburg images and Gershwin score that so effortlessly convey the essence of New York City’s floating metropolis. He starts off the film as though he were writing a book, but the theme drops off right at the end of the opening credits, which is, I suppose, just another charming mobius-strip element of the opener — he wishes he could write the definitive romantic New York novel and then is too overwhelmed by the mere idea to even continue. Maybe that excuses the lackluster (and unrightfully worshipped) film to follow; it’s hardly a great film about Manhattan itself and a lot more like his weak squabbling-couples films than his great odes to the mysteries and romance of his hometown. As an opener, though, this scene works perfectly. It’s perfectly post-modern, perfectly romantic, and perfectly cued and scored to suggest the bumbling work in progress of a writer who should know better than to try to capture the whole of New York in a single film.
Not to mention the fact that Annie Hall is probably the definitive film about New York, followed by Do the Right Thing, Once Upon a Time in America, Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver. Any I’m forgetting?
Filed under: Commentary, Directors | Tags: American Beauty, Dirty Pretty Things, Opening Scenes, Punch-Drunk Love, Steven Spielberg, Vanilla Sky
As any screenwriting textbook will tell you, the opening scene is the most important in your whole movie. If it doesn’t draw the viewer in immediately, chances are they aren’t going to hang around for the rest of the film. Raiders is obviously a great example, and in fact just about any Spielberg movie will fit the bill: the landing on the beach in Saving Private Ryan, the shark attack in Jaws, the coffins in the river in Empire of the Sun.
Some of my favorite movie openings are the ones that withhold information, presenting you with a scene so confusing and mysterious that you just have to stick around to find out what it all means. The opening few minutes of P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love are a favorite example:
Another terrifically bizarre opening? The first several minutes of Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, in which (and I unfortunately couldn’t find it on YouTube) Chiwetel Ejiofor’s hotel clerk is called up to a room where he discovers a human heart in the toilet and fishes it out with a wire coat hanger.
After watching Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, I did something I rarely do: I skipped back to the opening, just to watch the first scene again:
And I noticed something: I couldn’t turn it off. Not because I was so entranced by the story–I had just finished the movie, after all–but because every shot, every scene, led so seamlessly into the next. Eventually, I had to turn it off mid-scene for lack of any good stopping point. Those are the best openings: the ones that draw you in immediately and don’t give you a chance to walk away.
One last opener? American Beauty. A friend was once skeptical about watching this movie, so I invited him to watch the first scene, the long take on video of Thora Birch, and told him he was welcome to leave afterward, if he could.
He couldn’t.
Filed under: Commentary, Directors, Foreign Films | Tags: Cache, Michael Haneke, Opening Scenes
I’d like to kick off a discussion about our favorite opening scenes. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight on the big screen. (Finally! I thought I would have to wait until the 30th anniversary.) It has what must be one of the best first-ten-minutes in cinematic history. It’s hard to dispute Raiders for pure pop cinematic greatness. There are a lot of recent films, however, that have phenomenal first scenes. I’m thinking along the lines of Inside Man, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Cache and others. I’ll start collecting some video and laying out my favorite few from the past ten years or so.
The genius of Cache’s opening is the timing of the rewind. It’s like being jerked out of REM sleep at the exact moment the rhythm starts to kick in. Haneke gradually raises the tension level from “abject boredom” to “cut it with a butter knife” and then, at the exact moment we begin to slink back into complacency, the fuzzy stripes of the VCR in rewind mode thwart our sense of reality so completely that we are forced to evaluate everything in the film twice or three times to make sure we are comprehending the metalevels of the narrative. The final scene of the film nicely mimics and bookends the opening, but instead of looking at a blank tableau looking for the tiniest detail, we are faced with a massive swarm and asked to separate the noise from the static. It’s a film I respect more than I like, but it’s undeniable that it has one of the more ingenious and challenging openings in recent years.
Filed under: Commentary, Directors | Tags: Elephant, Gay, Gus Van Sant, Milk, The Times of Harvey Milk, The Wire
by Elliot
I think the difference between how you and I view the shower scene in Elephant–and how we view the movie in general–is that you seem to think that Van Sant was trying, with his portrayal of the Harris/Klebold characters, to explain their motivations. I see it completely differently. Sure, he borrowed some details from the case files (the first-person-shooter video game, for example) but this film is more about its own style. If Van Sant were so interested in characters, he would have crafted some himself, rather than letting the rest of the cast just play themselves. As for the homosexuality, I don’t think it’s meant to be read as a factor into their decision to kill. Rather, I thought is gave much greater depth to the characters, making them far less the cookie-cutter villains they could otherwise have been. As you know, I’ve been catching up on HBO’s The Wire, and one of my favorite characters is Michael K. Williams’s Omar Little. Omar is pure evil, but he’s also gay. It’s not homophobia–in fact, one of the most sympathetic cop characters on the show is a lesbian–but juxtaposing scenes of Little mercilessly shooting drug dealers with a shotgun and scenes of him lovingly caressing his latest young love interest (okay, he’s also a bit of a pederast) give the man far more depth and personality than the usual villains we see shooting people and then bedding gorgeous women. All it does is flesh the character out; I think you’d have to be a bit homophobic yourself to see it as directly related to or inspiring his acts of violence.
As for Milk, I’m looking forward to this one quite a bit, both as a fan of Van Sant and as an admirer of Sean Penn. That’s not to mention the great story, of course. Still, a Milk Best-Picture win would be far from the first to match the subject of a previous Best-Doc-Feature winner; Schindler’s List could be paired with any of a number of Holocaust-themed documentaries that have taken the big prize. If you haven’t actually seen The Times of Harvey Milk, by the way, you have to check it out. I’ve never cried at a movie, but–and I’m totally sacrificing my man-card on this one–I don’t think I’ve ever come closer than during the candlelight parade sequence of this terrific film.
Filed under: Directors | Tags: Elephant, Gay, Gus Van Sant, High School Musical, Milk
by Eitan
e, correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to me that Milk will be Gus Van Sant’s first film since My Own Private Idaho to deal explicitly with gay themes. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. After the nightmare of Elephant, which makes an offensive and tokenized use of a gay relationship in order to explore a cynical aspect of the Columbine shootings, it’s nice to see that Van Sant is reconnecting with a theme where he’s done relatively well in the past.
My problem with the shower scene in Elephant is not so much the idea that these two characters are written as both psychotic murderers and secret gay lovers — it’s the fact that Van Sant so casually and shortsightedly buys into the bigoted mythos about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, which was concocted by right-wing groups (along with their crackpot video games/Marilyn Manson theories) to toss another “evil inclination” into the stew of the twisted Trenchcoat Mafia psychology. When we watched the film at my house, you remarked that you trusted Van Sant to make this kind of statement about young gay men because he himself is a gay director, and to a certain extent that’s true. Still, I think it was a cheap ploy. In JFK, for example, Oliver Stone creates a kaleidoscopic image of every single conspiracy theory out there — mafia! LBJ! Military industrial complex! Castro! The two Oswalds! Stone makes the conspiracy theory stirfry work because he’s so damn ambitious. When Van Sant tries the same thing in Elephant, by throwing in a bunch of refried theories about the massacre, it simply doesn’t work. The gay part especially.
The truth is, I know that Van Sant is incredibly capable of handling gay themes, which is why Milk is near the top of the list for this winter. I wonder if they’re going to show Dan White guzzling down Twinkies…
I read an interview with Lucas Grabeel (yes, of High School Musical fame), who plays a photographer and friend of Harvey Milk in the upcoming biopic, and I was struck by a comment he made about working on a gay-themed film where nearly every actor was straight and the director was the only gay man on set. I’d like to point to Grabeel as a great example of an actor who has played a gay character who was truly written to be both unambiguously queer and unambiguously a charming role model for children. Of course, the director of High School Musical, Kenny Ortega, is gay himself, but it’s hard to find characters like that in children’s entertainment. The HSM movies are both pretty trashy, but it’s hard to ignore the merits of a character like Ryan Evans, who communicates his queerness in the most explicit way that one can in a Disney movie.
The Times of Harvey Milk won Best Documentary Feature in 1985. If Milk were to win Best Picture, would that be the first time that a Documentary Feature and a Motion Picture covering the same topic both won the highest Academy Award honors possible?
shot / reverse shot 