Tag: Richard Linklater

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Time Warp Drive-In Feels The Best of the Burn

Dazed and Confused

Every year, the Time Warp Drive-In series dedicates one of its monthly programs to celebrate psychedelia in all its forms. Gotta hand it to ’em, they know their audience.

This Saturday night at the Malco Summer Drive-In is the Best of the Burn — audience favorites from the previous years’ burn nights. First up is the Richard Linklater classic that made master monologist (and possible Texas gubernatorial candidate) Matthew McConaughey a household name. Dazed and Confused is the ultimate hangout movie. Think American Graffiti, if everyone was stoned the whole time. Here’s a clip where you can hear one of McConaughey’s now-timeless line readings: “It’d be a lot cooler if you did.”

The second film of the evening is one of the great literary adaptations of all time. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about a journalist blowing an assignment to cover a motorcycle race. So relatable. Misunderstood cinematic genius Terry Gilliam was perhaps the only person capable of bringing this one to life. In this clip, Thompson’s literary doppleganger Raoul Duke, played by not-yet-superstar Johnny Depp, tries to check into a hotel with the help of his attorney, a not-yet-superstar Benicio del Toro. “Ignore this terrible drug.”

The third film of the evening has been called the genesis of the stoner movie genre. Who but OG counterculture comedians Cheech and Chong could have made Up In Smoke? Here’s how the movie was sold in 1978. They don’t make trailers like this any more.

And finally, the granddaddy of them all, Reefer Madness. Rarely has any film, or any work of art at all, had its meaning so thoroughly reversed as Tell Your Children, the film produced by a church group to keep kids off the devil’s cabbage. Instead, it was bought by an exploitation producer Dwain Esper, who changed the title to Reefer Madness. Check out this warning of what will happen if you touch “the weed with its roots in Hell!” The intended audience’s reaction was “Don’t threaten me with a good time!”

The Time Warp Drive-In starts at dusk on Saturday at the Malco Summer Drive-In.

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Get Weird With The Time Warp Drive-In Animation Night

Keanu Reeves in A Scanner Darkly

The official theme for this month’s Time Warp Drive-In is “Strange Vibes — A World of Disturbed Animation.” Thanks to the early success of Disney, cartoons used to be considered exclusively for children — even though Walt himself tried to go the high art route with Fantasia in 1940. Sure, children love animation, but it’s never been true that there were no adult fans of animation, and the films of this program prove it.

Up first is a psychedelic classic. Heavy Metal started out as a French magazine of sci fi and fantasy comics which counted Moebius as its star contributor. Bringing the publication to the United States generated enough income to finance an animated film in 1981. It’s a loose anthology, with six directors creating a melange of animation styles. The soundtrack is a who’s who of late-’70s rock, with songs from Blue Öyster Cult, Devo, Nazareth, Journey, Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, and Stevie Nicks.

Get Weird With The Time Warp Drive-In Animation Night

Next up is a sleeper masterpiece by Richard Linklater. A Scanner Darkly is the director’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s semi-autobiographical sci fi novel. Written in the early ’70s, while the Nixonian drug war was heating up, and not concidentaly when Dick’s amphetamine habit was spiraling out of control, it is a deeply paranoid work of conflicting loyalties and deadly serious mind games. The casting is incredible. Keanu Reeves is Arctor, who is simultaneously a narcotics agent and a habituate of Substance D, the futuristic synthetic drug that he is charged with containing. Robert Downey Jr., who reportedly worked for SAG scale rates, would today command more than the film’s $8 million budget just to show up and crack wise. Winona Ryder, who next month will be back on Netflix with the third season of Stranger Things, stars as Donna, a hyper articulate drug addict based on Dick’s girlfriend from the early ’70s. The animation is by the same crew who did Linklater’s Waking Life, which used proprietary rotoscoping software developed by Bob Sabiston. It’s a haunting film that deserves its cult status.

Get Weird With The Time Warp Drive-In Animation Night (2)

The third film of the evening is Paprika, a groundbreaking anime from the late director Satoshi Kon, creator of the Paranoia Agent series. A doctor named Atsuko Chiba, voiced by Megumi Hayashibara of Pokemon fame, develops a new technology that allows her to enter people’s dreams. She starts illegally using it to help mentally ill patients under the alter ego Paprika. But her wildcat experiments have unintended consequences, and her conception of reality itself starts to break down. Paprika is often cited as an inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and it is a profoundly beautiful work of animation.

Get Weird With The Time Warp Drive-In Animation Night (3)

The show, produced by Black Lodge, Guerrilla Monster Films, Piano Man Pictures, Holtermonster Designs, and Malco, starts at dusk at the Malco Summer Drive-In. 

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Everybody Wants Some!!

Temple Baker, Blake Jenner, and J. Quinton Johnson bro it up in Everybody Wants Some!!

Quintin Tarantino likes to call films such as his own Pulp Fiction “hangout movies”. They’re films where the point is not so much the plot as it is the setting and characters. You watch those films over and over again because you like hanging out with these cool, idealized people, who you on some level come to regard as your friends.

In Richard Linklater’s long and idiosyncratic career, he’s made some of the great hangout movies. His classic Dazed and Confused is all about how fun it would be to hang out with a bunch of particularly awesome high schoolers—some of whom look like Matthew McConaughey and Milla Jovovich—in 1976. That element is there to a lesser extent in his more philosophical works, such his debut film Slacker and his 2001 experimental animated opus Waking Life. The director is excellent at creating worlds his audiences want to inhabit.

His new film, Everybody Wants Some!! (the two exclamation points are included in the title) is clearly cut from the same cloth as Dazed and Confused, as well as another film Linklater remade in 2005: Call it The Bad News Bears Go To College.

Our entry into the huge ensemble cast is through Jake (Blake Jenner), an entering freshman at the fictional Southeast Texas University. It’s 1980, so shorts are short and mustaches porny. Jake’s got a baseball scholarship, so he lives in a comfortably dilapidated old house that has been transformed into the team’s kind-of frat house. There he meets his teammates, a motley crew of Texas’ finest that range from the sheltered redneck Beuter (Will Brittain) to the meathead Plummer (Temple Baker), and the confident upper-classman slugger Kenny (Ryan Guzman).

Linklater’s hangout movies always include the anticipation of an event to supply the modicum of tension a conventional plot would normally create. In this case, it’s an onscreen countdown to the first day of class, and like any 18-year-old worth his or her salt, Jake and his buddies are determined to pack as much fun as possible into the long, school-free weekend.

In the process of bro-ing it up with his bros, Jake meets Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a sophomore performing arts major alive with the allure of a bigger and stranger world of college beyond the confines of the team. The low-key clash of cultures is the best part of Everybody Wants Some!! As the party boys drift from the practice field to the fading, cinder block disco called The Sound Machine, a punk squat, and a massive theater/art major party called Oz, they find out their jocular jock schtick doesn’t work the same in all quarters.

Like all hangout movies, the real meat is in the details, like the idyllic scene where Jake and a muscle car full of baseballers rap along to “Rapper’s Delight”, or how the big attraction at the theater kids’ party is a version of the Dating Game staged with characters from Alice In Wonderland. It’s all pleasant enough, but after the triumph of 2014’s Boyhood, it kind of feels like Linklater’s phoning it in on this one.

The real test of a hangout movie is the strength of the characters, but besides Deutch, none of the actors really rise to the occasion. Jenner’s Jake is a such a bland, nice guy type that Linklater’s attempts to imbue him with hidden depth ring a little false. Everybody Wants Some!! Is not a bad movie, it’s just a little dull. But if you count yourself among the legions of Dazed and Confused fans, you’ll find a lot to like.

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Boyhood

“Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing … A man can never understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.” — G.K. Chesterton

“We need guidance, we’ve been misled. Young and hostile, but not stupid … “ — Blink-182

If you’re the type of person who watches older movies and whispers things like, “Wow, I can’t believe how young Matthew McConaughey was in The Newton Boys,” to the person next to you, then Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s everyday epic spanning 12 years in the life of Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), his older sister Samantha (Linklater’s daughter Lorelei), his mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and his dad Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), might speak to you in a voice as old and irrefutable as time itself.

Then again, it might not. It’s odd to like but not love Boyhood, which coasts into Memphis on a tidal wave of critical praise. However, like life itself, the film is full of ups and downs.

Because it was shot in installments over 12 years, Linklater’s film occasionally seems to lunge from one time period to the next, jarring you like a teenager learning how to drive a stick shift. However, it soon becomes clear that Linklater chose to follow Mason’s road from childhood to college without consulting the usual mile markers or signposts. We never see anyone win the big game, lose their virginity, or follow their bliss into the bright future. The few scenes of domestic unrest are troubling, but they don’t drive the story either. Moreover, people who seem like they might be important — a kid with a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, a cute girl in middle school who thinks Mason’s short hair is “kewl,” two bullies in a bathroom — often recede quietly into the background.

Impatient viewers might grow exasperated with these go-nowhere encounters and see them as symptomatic of the film’s apparent lack of focus. For example, Linklater explores Mason’s teen years in much greater detail than his early childhood, while Samantha’s transformation from a mean, mouthy toddler to a sad-eyed but cool college girl is, unfortunately, put aside. Which is too bad, because Lorelei Linklater is my favorite thing about the film.

On the other hand, Boyhood’s resistance to conventional narrative rhythms is crucial to its larger philosophical point. Although it’s comforting to imagine that a person’s life follows a pre-ordained script, Boyhood depicts Mason’s life as a series of potential stories that begin and end without notice or warning. One long scene where Mason shares beers and stories with some upperclassmen at a house under construction (nice metaphor) seems to lay the foundation for lifelong friendships. Yet after this scene, the boys never reappear. They are merely passing through Mason’s life, just as he is passing through theirs.

Yet, Mason and Samantha’s change and growth over time remain queerly compelling. In one cut, Mason’s voice drops an octave; he’s beginning to sound like a teenager. Almost imperceptibly, his pre-teen cuteness matures into a soft handsomeness that eventually prompts a family friend to hit on him at his graduation party. In full view of everyone, the sullen little eighth grader becomes an intelligent, opinionated slacker-in-training. In a sense, then, Boyhood is an earnest, literal attempt to understand what all those distant relatives are trying to say whenever they exclaim, “You’ve gotten so BIG!”

Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane

Getting big is easy, though. Growing up is harder, even when it could be much worse. For Mason, growing up consists of sitting through a dozen years of poor advice from adults too old or too embarrassing to take seriously. The best scene in this vein involves Mason Sr. trying to explain birth control to Samantha in a bowling alley while Mason looks on with a bemused and curious eye that may explain his later interest in photography.

Boyhood may seem formally daring and unique, but it speaks to other works in Linklater’s filmography as well. Linklater’s decision to cast Hawke, one of the leads in the similarly time-obsessed Before trilogy, only tells part of the story. An animated vision of Lorelei appears at the beginning of 2001’s Waking Life — she’s the little girl with the paper fortune teller who says, “Dream is destiny.” And when Mason and his step-brother go into a liquor store to cash a check for their drunken dad, the one who helps them out is an actor named David Blackwell, who played a similarly mellow liquor-store clerk in Linklater’s 1993 masterpiece Dazed and Confused. As Samantha grows up, she starts to look like her dad; as Mason starts to express his skepticism about the future, he starts to talk and think like him.

When the drama wanes, the intertextuality fascinates. And so does the film’s unintentional scrapbook of cultural and technological change. The pop songs, playthings, and young-adult obsessions in the film’s first hour or so become suggestive and profound in part because Linklater probably had no idea that he was filming potentially extinct rituals, practices, and everyday-use items. It’s a trip to see a college professor using an overhead projector while students take notes with paper and pencil, or hear Samantha talk on a cordless phone and tell her friend that she’s got someone on the other line, or watch Roger Clemens fanning batters for the Astros.

At times like these, there’s such an artless, determined ground-level documentary element at work in Boyhood that its average-looking imagery and melodramatic seasonings feel like unwelcome intrusions from less interesting movies. In other words, one alcoholic dad is understandable, but two is too much. In addition, Mason’s awkward interactions with many of his fellow Texans seem strangely cartoonish. The older, bohemian audience I saw this with chortled with mirth at Mason Sr.’s theft of a McCain-Palin yard sign, and they laughed at the “red letter” Holy Bible and 20-gauge shotgun Mason gets from his grandparents for his birthday. However, the last laugh is on the audience. Mason takes these things in stride, and the first time he shoots something he has the same euphoria as anyone else who’s aimed at something and hit it.

There’s more here than there is room to talk about it, or at least it seems like there is: It seems like a highlight reel from a potentially endless rough cut. Yet after nearly three swift-moving hours, Boyhood ends — or I guess you could say it begins.

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Time Warp Drive-In’s Hell on Wheels

Automotive and film technology came of age at roughly the same time, and cars have always been a particular source of fascination for filmmakers. When the first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey in 1933, it was the beginning of a potent and inevitable synergy between two of America’s favorite cultural forces. Movies sold the dream of freedom, and cars became the most prominent and expensive symbols of that freedom. People would pay to sit in their cars and watch movies about cars.

The theme of the next edition of the popular Time Warp Drive-In series (running the last Saturday of each month through October) is Hell On Wheels, which gave the organizers, filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video proprietor Matthew Martin, plenty of choices for programming.

The night will kick off with George Lucas’ American Graffiti. The film was Lucas’ first big hit, made after the studio-destroying dystopian sci-fi film THX 1138 had all but ended his career. Few films can claim the deep cultural impact of Lucas’ Star Wars, but American Graffiti comes close. Its meandering, multi-character story structure bears a resemblance to Robert Altman or Richard Linklater’s work but is utterly unlike the Hero’s Journey plots that would come to be associated with Lucas’ later work. Still, Lucas’ techno-fetishism is on full display with the loving beauty shots of classic autos designed in the days before wind tunnels and ubiquitous seat belts.

Even though the film was set in 1962, the chronicle of aimless youth cruising around a sleepy California town kicked off a wave of nostalgia for all things 1950s. The pre-British Invasion rock-and-roll and doo-wop soundtrack became one of the best selling film soundtracks in history, and Ron Howard — who, as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, was himself a bit of TV nostalgia — and Cindy Williams would ride the popularity of American Graffiti into starring roles on Happy Days and its spinoff, Laverene & Shirley. It also marked the big break of a struggling actor and part-time carpenter named Harrison Ford.

The second Hell on Wheels film, Two-Lane Blacktop, is a classic hot rod movie from 1971 starring James Taylor (yes, that James Taylor) and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. If American Graffiti manifested America’s longing for a simpler time before the social upheaval of the 1960s, Two-Lane Blacktop was one of the counterculture’s dying gasps. It’s an Easy Rider-like plot with muscle cars: Two nameless street racers heading east from California challenge a square (Warren Oates) to a cross-country race to Washington, D.C. The dialog is sparse and the performances fairly flat, but the real point of Two-Lane Blacktop is the wide-open vistas of a now-vanished America.

The third film of the night, 1968’s Bullitt, is similarly light on dialog, but it is the opposite of counterculture. Steve McQueen at his sexiest plays a homicide cop trying to solve the murder of a mob informant. McQueen’s Frank Bullitt is the prototype of the “playing by his own rules” cop that would become so familiar in later films, but the movie’s real significance lies in the epic car chase that sees McQueen driving an iconic 1968 fastback Mustang through the streets of San Francisco set to Lalo Schifrin’s swinging jazz score. The oft-imitated but never equaled scene is worth the price of admission for the entire evening.

The program closes with Robert Mitchum playing a Tennessee bootlegger in1953’s legendary Thunder Road. Mitchum co-wrote the screenplay and produced the movie, which tells the story of a Korean War vet’s turbulent return to the violent world of moonshiners and flophouses. The noir-inflected film served as the template for dozens of hot rod exploitation stories, taught greasers to emulate Mitchum’s laconic cool, and even inspired Bruce Springsteen to write a song about it. It’s a fitting capper to a night of burning rubber and tail fins.

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The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.

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The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Industry Is Us

Fast Food Nation opens with a zoom into a sketchy-looking fast-food burger patty. The shot rhymes with one from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which penetrated into the green grass of small-town America to find all kinds of creepy, crawly activity. But if Blue Velvet suggested there was a dark heart pulsing beneath a happy facade, Fast Food Nation has a much more basic point to make: “There’s shit in the meat.”

Director Richard Linklater and co-writer Eric Schlosser (who wrote the exposé on which the film is based) convert Schlosser’s panorama into a fictional film by creating a cosmos of characters  who allow different entry points into the fast-food industry. After the president of barely fictional corporate chain Mickey’s receives a report that there’s high fecal-bacteria content in his burgers, he sends a marketing executive (Greg Kinnear) to a meat-packing plant in Cody, Colorado, to investigate. Among the employees at the plant are a couple of illegal immigrants (Wilder Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno) dealing with unsafe, unsanitary working conditions. While in town, the exec chats up a teenager (Ashley Johnson) working the counter at the local Mickey’s franchise, who is later inspired to eco-activism.

Fast Food Nation climaxes by sneaking onto the “killing floor” of a real slaughterhouse, where the film captures the whole process of killing, disemboweling, skinning, and carving up cattle. It’s gruesome, but whether or not you’re outraged or inspired to action may be ultimately about the attitude you bring to the movie.

And Fast Food Nation is less of a tract than you might imagine (or maybe than it should be), with Linklater tweaking liberal naiveté when a group of collegiate activists try to “free” a herd of perfectly disinterested cattle and including a ferocious cameo from Bruce Willis as a Mickey’s middle-manager who provides the voice of cynical realism.

This is Linklater’s second feature this year and second unconventional adaptation, following his animated take on the Philip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly. The narrative mode of Fast Food Nation is similar to such heavyweight process movies as Traffic (about drugs) and Syriana (global oil addiction), but Linklater and Schlosser’s movie seems oddly anemic by comparison. For all of his strengths — and I think Linklater is one of the very best contemporary filmmakers, with a couple of masterpieces to his credit (Dazed & Confused, Beyond Sunset) — Linklater might be too rambling and genial a director for this material. Fast Food Nation is still highly watchable and highly relevant, but the movie doesn’t quite live up to its material.

At its best, Fast Food Nation — like Schlosser’s book — is about more than just fast food, using the subject as a metaphor for the raging corporatism of American life generally. (One of the most memorable passages in Schlosser’s book had nothing to do with the food industry — it was about how car companies bought up mass-transit systems around the country and shut them down to build more of a demand for automobiles.)

In this sense, the counterpoint to Willis’ free-market proselytizing comes in the form of pissed-off rancher Kris Kristofferson, whose cameo provides the movie’s conscience. He dresses down Kinnear’s corporate enabler, but in a gracious way. No matter how well you sell it, the rancher says, it doesn’t change the fact that there’s still shit in the meat.

Fast Food Nation

Opens Friday, November 17th

Studio on the Square