A Child’s-Eye View of the End of the World

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 55
Guillermo Del Toro, The Devil’s Backbone

Carlos, newly orphaned and unprepared for violence, is dropped off at an orphanage in the last year of the Spanish Civil War. There he encounters one of the least subtle symbols in cinematic history: an unexploded Nationalist bomb in the front courtyard. Inside, he finds the boys playing out the events of the war outside, without really understanding their roles. He also encounters the ghost of another boy who died under murky circumstances.

This, Guillermo Del Toro’s first feature film, captures several themes which recur throughout his body of work. A society caught in rapid change, and people unprepared for the consequences of that change. A world where life and afterlife are separated by mere moments. The tedium of life, punctuated by flashes of sudden violence.

Carlos struggles to acclimate himself to the orphanage’s internal politics. The concept of “politics” turns unusually literal here: administrators Casares and Carmen support the Loyalist cause, with its rhetoric of democracy and freedom. But that rhetoric sounds hollow when Jaime, the school bully, rules the residents with an iron fist. As often happens with children, the bully appears dominant and charismatic; but like Franco’s Nationalists, he rules erratically and inconsistently.

Looming over the orphanage is the story of Santi, a child who vanished the day the unexploded bomb fell. The timing is suspicious, but nobody ever found Santi’s body. Sneaking around after curfew, Carlos encounters a spectral boy with an open head wound, but the apparition won’t communicate. Instead, it wordlessly indicates something untoward is happening with Jacinto, the orphanage janitor, whose loyalties are strictly to himself.

Del Toro’s storytelling is slow, cerebral, and moody. Despite the wartime setting, his characters spend the most time simply waiting. Jaime and Jacinto, the child and adult bullies respectively, occasionally try to make events happen, to offset their existential boredom; but when their forced actions don’t go according to plan, they feign gape-jawed surprise. Bad people claim to be helpless when bad acts produce bad consequences.

Most importantly, though, Del Toro doesn’t tiptoe around the supernatural themes. Ghost story filmmakers often attempt to skirt their ghosts’ reality, keeping their gossamer spirits in the corner of the shot, where characters can explain them away. Not here. As in other Del Toro movies, the ghost here is real, solid, and centrally framed. When Carlos runs from the ghost, he isn’t fleeing a shimmery haint; Santi’s ghost is palpable, and his blood is still hot.

Carlos confronts the ghost of Santi in The Devil’s Backbone

Jacinto believes the administrators are hiding a treasure that he could steal, in order to ingratiate himself with the Nationalists. Like the ghost, Casares and Carmen’s treasure is real, but nevertheless immaterial. The treasure matters less than the way the treasure makes people act. Greed makes Jacinto reckless, which makes Casares defensive. Eventually the administrators chase Jacinto, the Nationalist bully, out of the building. But that only makes him more aggressive.

The children’s loyalty unfortunately fluctuates. With Casares seemingly ascendant, Jaime declares his support for Casares and the Loyalists. But that reveals to Carlos how cowardly and inconsistent the bully actually is. He takes it on himself to investigate the building, and its resident ghost, willing to shoulder the cost. But when Jacinto returns, now backed with Nationalist support and the ability to actually hurt the children, Carlos realizes he’s now completely alone.

Well, alone except for the ghost.

That brings up one remaining recurrent theme in Del Toro’s work. Yes, in his world, ghosts are real, not something the living can rationally explain away. But they aren’t monsters. Del Toro’s ghosts linger because they need something: an unfinished task, undelivered message, or unresolved injustice. We, the living, can absolve the dead and set their spirits free, but only by paying attention, only by listening without words. For ghosts, this world is purgatory, and the living hold the key.

World events like the Spanish Civil War attract Del Toro, not because they're violent, but because they test human loyalties. (Del Toro would return to the Spanish Civil War for Pan’s Labyrinth.) People have to choose sides in wartime; those who claim neutrality get clobbered by those who care enough to fight. Carlos cares deeply, but without ideological commitment, so he initially gets swayed by superficial charm. He learns, however, to take sides for solid, palpable reasons.

Like with most of Del Toro’s ghost stories, the message here is far from spectral. Ghosts linger because the past isn't really the past, and the living bear a responsibility to those who can no longer speak for themselves.

A Very Proper and Decorous English Heist

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 54
Charles Crichton (director), The Lavender Hill Mob

Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is the epitome of the postwar British nothing man: firmly middle class and middle management, he has little to show for his life. He’s spent twenty years supervising gold bullion shipments for a London commercial bank, handling money he’ll never be allowed to touch. One day his bank announces plans to move him to another department, and Henry decides to act. He’ll never see such money himself unless he steals it.

For approximately ten years after World War II, Ealing Studios, Britain’s longest surviving film studio, produced a string of comedies so consistent, they became a brand. They mixed tones throughout, shifting from dry wordplay and dark sarcasm, straight into loud, garish slapstick, often in the same scene. They shared certain general themes, though, especially the collision between Old Britain, wounded by the war, and a chaotic, freebooting new culture that hadn’t quite found its identity.

When Henry discovers his neighbor, Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), owns a small-scale metal foundry, the men decide to collaborate on Henry’s hastily considered heist. Through a caper too silly to recount, Henry and Alfred recruit two small-time hoodlums to perform the actual robbery. This union of jobs, classes, and accents makes a statement about Britain in 1951: the old divisions between castes are melting away. Something new is arising, and that something is probably criminal.

Besides their themes, the classic Ealing comedies shared other traits. Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway were two among a rotating repertory company appearing in several movies. Films were shot in real-life London streets, and in studios built in repurposed wartime aircraft hangars. The movies’ design bespeaks a Britain that existed only briefly, during the decades between Churchill and Thatcher: hung up on propriety and dignity, but also suddenly young, history bombed away in the Blitz.

The robbery is plucky, entrepreneurial, almost downright admirable. Henry’s crew execute a slapstick heist so silly, the Keystone Kops would’ve doffed their hats. But having done it, the crew find themselves actually holding a vanload of gold bullion, in a country still cash-strapped and suffering under wartime rationing. Gold is worthless, they discover, unless they can sell it. Which means smuggling it out of the country under the Metropolitan Police’s watchful, but easily distracted, eye.

Like in all Ealing comedies, indeed most of 20^th century British comedy, much of the humor comes from watching pretentions disintegrate. In another Guinness starring vehicle, The Man in the White Suit, this disintegration is literal, as conflicting sides tear the title character’s newfangled fabric to shreds. Here, it’s more metaphorical. The more our protagonists’ suits become rumpled, the more their hats fly off in frantic pursuits, the more they escape their prewar class roles.

Alec Guinness (left) and Stanley Holloway in The Lavender Hill Mob

This movie culminates in the police pursuing our antiheroes through London streets. This was seventeen years before Steve McQueen’s Bullitt made car chases a cinema staple, so Henry and Alfred make their own rules: frantic but dignified, they never forget their place. They use police tactics to distract the police, turning British decorum against itself, but their insistence on such polite observance eventually dooms them. These sports can escape everything—except their own British nature.

Alec Guinness plays Henry Holland with a gravitas which exceeds one character. In later years, he would become famous for playing implacable elder statesmen in classics like The Bridge on the River Kwai and the original Star Wars. This character has seeds of these more famous roles, but Guinness survives indignities we can’t imagine Obi-Wan Kenobi facing. Henry Holland goes from clerk to mastermind to goofy fugitive, all with seamless integrity. Guinness’ decorum never cracks.

This movie is worth watching in itself, but it also introduces the whole Ealing subgenre. It showcases the personalities, themes, and storytelling that made Ealing a classic. Most Ealing comedies were American successes, and repertory actors, especially Guinness, became American stars. But the genre lasted only briefly; the BBC bought the studio in 1957, and attempts to recapture the Ealing magic failed. Tom Hanks took Guinness’ role in a remake of The Ladykillers, and tanked.

Put briefly, the category is a surviving emblem of a time, place, and culture. Like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, or Douglas Adams’ Arthur Dent, Guinness’ Henry Holland is a British man in a time when being British didn’t mean much anymore. This movie, with its postwar man struggling for dignity amid changing times and a mobilized proletariat, couldn’t have been made any earlier or later than it was. Watching it is like a time machine.

Jump, Jive, and Wail Against the Machine

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 53
Thomas Carter (director), Swing Kids

Imagine a world where a group of relatively well-off White teenagers adopted the culture, dance, and trappings of Black musicians. The teenagers pretend this adoption is apolitical, and their subculture is merely fun. But the racially segregated, authoritarian state sees this White embrace of Black culture as tantamount to treason. So they use vaguely written laws to force kids into mandatory social retraining. Some kids resist this conversion; others can’t.

Screenwriter Jonathan Marc Feldman and director Thomas Carter presented this movie in the Reagan/Bush I era’s immediate hangover. Their intended commentary on recent events was particularly unsubtle. This perhaps explains why critics greeted this movie with ambivalence; Roger Ebert, a dedicated acolyte of ars gratia artis, particularly hated it. Yet in subsequent decades, its commentary has become only more relevant, its message more prescient.

Peter Muller (Robert Sean Leonard) and his friends admire the freedom and authenticity of American and British pop culture over Germany during the ascendent Reich. They cut a rug in unlicensed dance clubs with music first recorded by Black and Jewish artists like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. As often happens with new youth subcultures, their rebellion includes petty crime. Peter gets arrested, and sentenced to join the Hitler Youth.

The opening act really emphasizes the Swing Kids’ desire to avoid politics. The overwhelmingly White subculture simply yearns for the liberty they perceive in minority cultures, blind to the ways oppression shapes that culture. The Swing Kids refuse to take sides even as Germany begins the march to war. This even though many members are of conscription age: they’ll almost certainly be expected to carry arms for the authoritarian state.

After Peter is forced to join the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, shortened to HJ), his fellow Swing Kid Thomas (Christian Bale) also joins, in a show of solidarity. They pursue a double life, keeping up with HJ ethics of athleticism, nationalism, and militarism by day. At night they don their flamboyant British suits and dance feverishly. They insist they can maintain that dualism, until the moment they can’t.

Their friend Arvid (Frank Whaley), who is Jewish-coded, plays a mean jazz guitar and admires Django Reinhart. Arvid makes bank playing underground clubs and basement dances. But in an autocratic surveillance state, it doesn’t take long before HJ thugs come calling. A back-street beating breaks several bones in Arvid’s hand, rendering him unable to play. Stuck alone in a shabby loft, Peter and Thomas must decide which side they’re on.

l-r: Frank Whaley, Christian Bale, and Robert Sean Leonard in Swing Kids

Feldman and Carter exaggerate the Swing Kids’ moral trajectory. Their early insistence on political innocence is so overwhelming that you initially wonder whether they’re deliberately deceiving themselves. But that willful ignorance gives way quickly. Thomas, surrounded by constant HJ propaganda, eventually starts to believe it. Peter, dragooned into government atrocities, goes the other direction and prepares for a confrontation.

This deliberately didactic theme didn’t help with critics. The movie’s gut-punch arc of moral specificity led some to disparage it as a meaningless weeper designed for children; Ebert, near his death, included this movie among his list of worst movies ever. Undoubtedly, it guides viewers with a heavy hand, and fears that its mostly young intended audience won’t get the message unless it’s heavily signposted.

Yet as educators and activists feud over how exactly to teach that audience about the war, this movie has gained second life. Its aggressively sentimental approach to the lessons the characters learn—especially Peter—reflects the betrayal students feel when they realize the history they’ve learned has been thoroughly whitewashed. Yes, this movie is unsubtle. But so is the discovery of the depths of cruelty humans repeatedly achieve.

It also forces the intended audience to examine itself. Just as Hamburg teenagers pinched Black swing culture, Memphis youths stole Black rock’n’roll, and Oakland kids filched hip-hop. In every case, White kids pretended their cooptation of Black culture was apolitical, that their use of the signs and signifiers of rebellion were party-time fun. White kids love Black culture, but generally need jolted to recognize the forces that shaped that culture.

One can question whether the Swing Kids subculture actually accomplished anything. Doomed resistance movements, from Wat Tyler’s rebellion to the Order of the White Rose to the Woodstock generation, are generally more celebrated after the battle is over. But in a conformist, autocratic state, the Swing Kids movement reminded its participants that they needed, ultimately, to answer to their own consciences. That’s one thing the state can’t take away.

Today’s world can stand to learn that lesson.

The Other Side of the California Dream

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 52
Carl Franklin (writer/director), Devil in a Blue Dress

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins only wanted to earn an honest dollar and pay his mounting Los Angeles mortgage bills. Not many Black men own their own houses in his city and time, after all. So when a hulking White man in a flashy suit offers Easy straight cash to find a missing White girl who enjoys visiting Black jazz clubs, it feels like a welcome payday. That us, until leads Easy questions start turning up dead.

We generally don’t associate the Left Coast with the pervasive “color line” that divided many Twentieth Century American cities. But in the years surrounding World War II, California had every bit the segregated culture and bigoted tendencies. Black Americans from Texas and Louisiana came to La-La Land for the same reasons they settled in Chicago and New York, because the big cities offered work. But as elsewhere, what one hand offered, the other took away.

Easy finds himself managing the tension between two communities while seeking his target, Daphne Monet. White people need information from the Black community, and having aggressively built segregated institutions, they cannot cross the borders they’ve created. Black people need White money, and also White tolerance, both of which they can purchase if they’re willing to sell their integrity. But once the two start mingling, the implicit violence that keeps the communities divided starts becoming explicit.

This slow, thoughtful neo-noir already appeared like an artifact from another era when it appeared in 1995. Director Carl Franklin overexposed several key shots to create California’s sun-streaked postwar fatigue. In Franklin’s distinctively dated cinematography, Easy is proud of owning his single-family home with lawn and picket fence, but that house looks slightly singed, with dust permeating every crevice. L.A. is a city of promise, but to Franklin, that promise has already started wearing thin.

As crimes start accumulating, people on both sides of the color barrier consider Easy a trustworthy source. Though hired to find Daphne Monet, she quickly finds him, begging his help negotiating her return to her fiancé. But that fiancé, in whose name Easy has been seeking Daphne, appears never to have heard of Easy. Who, then, sent flashy DeWitt Albright into central L.A. to find Daphne? And how does this affect the L.A. mayoral race?

Franklin’s storytelling deliberately channels previous Southern California noir thrillers, like Double Idemnity and Chinatown. Unlike the French movies that originated the smog-shrouded noir genre, L.A. noir is notable for its unrelenting sunlight, making warmth and visibility feel as oppressive as European mist. This movie appeared around the same time as other neo-noirs, like L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Drive. But its specifically Black sensibilities set it apart, emphasizing those neglected by California’s booming postwar bonanza economy.

Jennifer Beals and Denzel Washington in Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress

Cinematography emphasizes this movie’s oppressive ethos. Franklin shoots many scenes from a low angle that places the horizon above the midpoint, placing the viewer below the characters’ eye level, making us feel low to the ground. Although Franklin has few scenes of out-and-out violence, those he does have distinctly lack glamour and grace. Fighting, for him, is a clumsy enterprise; none of that “gun fu” that would start infecting Hollywood soon after, with The Matrix.

Against this visual austerity, Franklin contrasts a lush Elmer Bernstein score. The sound reflects a changing attitude in jazz: though the musician favor traditional instruments and rhythms, their compositions are altered by electronic amplification and a harder, more aggressive backbeat. Bernstein judiciously mingles his own compositions with period icons like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and in the noir style, he leaves several key scenes silent, letting character, dialog, and action convey the thoughtful story.

Like the Walter Mosley novel upon which it’s based, this movie was an experiment, to determine whether the market would support a franchise. The novel launched the Easy Rawlins franchise, and helped elevate Mosley to the first tier of commercial success. Despite a star cast and critical praise, the movie failed to recreate that success, barely breaking even at the box office. Denzel Washington’s performance was iconic, but only to those few who saw it.

Too bad audiences missed it, though. It provides a view into the institutions that enforced the color barrier during a time that California tried to romanticize itself, selling the “California dream” to anyone who could afford it. Easy shows us the unromantic side, the side that didn’t profit from postwar excess. He shows a man, dragged into the institutions of power, who grows into his role, becoming the defender his people never knew they needed.

The Weird-Enough Wizard of Odds

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 51
Ralph Bakshi (writer/director), Wizards

In a post-nuclear future, humanity has become a visitor on a fairy-covered Earth. But that hardly means everything has become peaceful. The wizard Avatar serves as advisor to the president of Montagar, a bucolic forest nation where citizens teach children to husband the soil and distrust technology. But Avatar’s twin brother Blackwolf rules an autocratic kingdom and yearns to conquer his brother’s lands. He’s discovered a tool which may make that possible: literal Nazi propaganda.

Animator and writer Ralph Bakshi made his name in the 1960s and 1970s creating films that pinched the Disney aesthetic, but were adamantly not intended for children. His 1972 comedy Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to be rated X. But he always dreamed of returning to the science fiction and fantasy themes which first propelled his interest in drawing. 20^th Century Fox shared his vision, at least hypothetically, but flinched upon release.

Blackwolf sends robots to invade Montagar, causing chaos and destruction throughout the forest. Avatar and his bodyguard, Weehawk, capture one robot and recondition it to serve the interests of peace. Because Montagar has neither army nor weapons, Avatar and Weehawk commence a quest to find and stop Blackwolf inside his own lair. Accompanied by Avatar’s apprentice and love interest Elinore, they must seek an enemy who has learned how to bend masses to his will.

Bakshi worked mostly without support from mainstream studios. Though he regularly got distribution deals with companies like Fox or Warner, he assiduously avoided working for them directly. He especially hated Disney’s influence which, after Walt’s passing, had become ingrown and moribund. (Disney’s decline wouldn’t reverse until the middle 1980s.) This gave him remarkable creative freedom, like fellow indie animator and Disney refugee Don Bluth, but forced him to work within shoestring budgets.

This freedom results in a big, sloppy product which revels in its excesses. Bakshi’s team clearly had oodles of fun creating this movie. Its disco-era morality is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and shows distrust not only of the nuclear weapons looming over the Cold War, but also the technology which made such weapons possible. It also emphasizes that, no matter how enlightened True Believers think their society has become, violence always looms around the horizon.

Perhaps Bakshi’s upbringing contributes to this. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he grew up mostly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Foggy Bottom, Washington. These East Coast cities were rife with bigotry, including both antisemitism and legal segregation. Though Bakshi’s family made it to America in time to avoid the bloody excesses of World War II, he grew up seeing the ideology that had been crushed in Europe, making its nest and laying its eggs over in America.

left to right: Weehawk, Elinore, Avatar, and the robot Peace in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Bakshi’s world reeks of moral binaries. He depicts the forests of Montagar as bucolic, lush, and stranger to violence. Blackwolf’s kingdom of Scortch is sooty and industrialized, occupied by orcs and trolls. (If this sounds familiar, well spotted: Bakshi would direct the first big-screen Lord of the Rings adaptation in 1978, a failure upon release.) When Blackwolf’s modernity forces a confrontation with Montagar, only Avatar’s small adventuring party upholds Montagar’s deep anti-modernist conscience.

20^th Century Fox gave Bakshi a distribution deal for this movie at the same time it bankrolled an ambitious young director named George Lucas. Struggling after a string of bad decisions, Fox was willing, post-1975, to support riskier ventures. But it kept both Bakshi and Lucas on tight budgets, forcing both to pay out-of-pocket to complete their projects. Bakshi created fantasy crowd scenes by rotoscoping vintage Swedish historical epics, and intercutting snippets of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

The finished produce horrified Fox and drew lukewarm responses from critics; Fox accorded Wizards a limited release. Unlike Star Wars, Wizards never overcame this limitation, and though it returned a profit, the outcome was small enough to sour Fox’s relationship with Bakshi. This movie never found its real audience until home video, when college-aged audiences started getting high and gawping at the movie’s Technicolor spectacle. It was, in that sense, a product of its time.

Sadly, Bakshi’s lurid adult style never found its mainstream breakthrough. His only big-studio production, Cool World, died so horribly, it ended his career; he mostly does illustrations and comix now. Yet periodically, new audiences discover this forgotten gem, and seemingly admire how unashamed it is. Wizards is overblown, messy, unsubtle, and garish. It’s also dated fun, and audiences apparently never get tired of its unapologetic energy. This movie embodies everything Bakshi ever did right.

Lights, Camera, Inaction

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 50
Andrew Niccol (writer-director), S1m0ne

Veteran movie director Victor Taransky has grown disillusioned with Hollywood: with demanding actors, interfering producers, and insatiable audiences. He got into movies to create art, but he’s become beholden to the money. Then one day, a computer programmer approaches Taransky with a priceless invention: a completely digital actress. Taransky thinks he’s found his artistic salvation. But controlling the perfect actress simply creates new problems he never anticipated.

This movie garnered lukewarm reviews and barely broke even upon release in 2002; it lacked studio support, and never found an audience until its home media release. Yet it’s received a new lease on life with recent developments, real and proposed, in computer learning heuristics. Promises which this movie made in 2002, Hollywood wants to fulfill today. It’s almost like the studios didn’t understand this movie’s parable of artistic control.

Simulation One, whom Taransky rechristens Simone, is the filmmaker’s ideal: a beautiful, graceful, and infinitely adaptable actress who makes no demands. She exists entirely as she is and follows Taransky’s directions without question. Her human costars, who have frequently grown indolent in their fame, find themselves inspired to resume improving themselves. Studio executives count their receipts. Nobody ever questions why they’ve never met Simone, who gets inserted in postproduction.

Al Pacino plays Victor Taransky much like he played Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, as a frazzled wreck whose failures push him to take extreme measures. Like Wortzik, Taransky doesn’t know how to control the monster he’s created. (For purely plot reasons, the programmer who wrote Simone’s code is excluded from the story.) He simply wants to finish his latest big-screen extravaganza after his designated star abandons the set.

Canadian model Rachel Roberts plays Simone as an Anglo-American icon of fair-skinned beauty. Roberts had done some advertising campaigns, but had no prior acting credits, making her, like Simone, a complete cypher. To enhance the illusion, the theatrical release didn’t include Roberts’ name; she wasn’t added to the credits until the home media release. Perhaps learning from this movie’s message, Roberts chose to avoid stardom, pursuing only occasional guest roles.

Rachel Roberts in her only starring role, as the title character in Andrew Niccol's S1m0ne

Simone salvages not only Taransky’s picture, but his foundering career. Audiences, costars, and studio execs love her. Taransky struggles to handle the sudden demand for his newest discovery, whom he cannot admit is phony. Managing Simone’s career quickly becomes his full-time job, one that keeps him away from the family whom he already barely knows. Taransky invented Simone to control her, but before long, she controls him.

Everyone seemingly loves Simone. But the longer we watch, the clearer it becomes that nobody really loves Simone; they imbue her with their favorite virtues, and idolize the myth they’ve created. The movie includes a post-credits scene, a relative rarity pre-MCU, encapsulating this perfectly: a moon-eyed fan watches rigged footage of Simone and locks onto one insignificant detail. From that, he deduces they’re star-crossed, if only he could meet her.

Again, Taransky initially loves Simone because she makes no demands whatsoever. Contrast this with his snippy studio-chosen star, played by Winona Ryder, whose ever-shifting demands become costlier than his actual shooting budget. But the fewer demands Simone makes, the more demands Taransky starts receiving from other stakeholders. Everyone wants something from her: money, art, public morals. Taransky, the only one who knows how to operate her program, has to deliver.

These aren’t fiddling issues. The exact reasons Victor Taransky initially loves Simone are the exact reasons the AMPTP recently threatened to replace background extras with scanned images. Hollywood wants compliant actors who don’t expect to be paid, respected, or kept safe. Lucasfilm, a Disney subsidiary, owns James Earl Jones’ voice, ensuring he’ll continue performing Darth Vader, for free, long after he’s laid in clay.

The whole point of Simone is that the Hollywood mogul thinks he’ll control her; the whole lesson is that he’s wrong. The traits of compliance and adaptability which Taransky loves, increase the demands laid upon him. His attempts disavow Simone only create new problems, as not only do studio execs resent the lost revenue, but audiences resent the lost icon who saw their own supposed virtues in her.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s previous filmography includes Gattaca and The Truman Show, movies about the futility of chasing perfection and control. This is Niccol’s first attempt at comedy, which perhaps threw reviewers, who didn’t always grasp his dry, understated style. Though Niccol offers only occasional laugh-out-loud moments, his deft irony underscores the absurdity of his situation. And it presciently foreshadows the path Hollywood has taken since.

Law & Justice in the Other New York

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 49
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, Brother’s Keeper

Sometime in the small hours of June 7th, 1990, poor dirt farmer William Ward died in his bed. He was 64 years old and had been in failing health for some time. Police initially accepted this as just something that happens. But a hotshot medical examiner soon found slight irregularities in William’s remains and proclaimed foul play. Police quickly arrested William’s youngest surviving brother, Delbert, charging him with “mercy killing.”

Documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky built their career around following people that the media world gawks at without bothering to understand. They created a trilogy of documentaries surrounding the West Memphis Three, the poster children for the 1980s Satanic Panic. They also worked extensively with the rock band Metallica. After Sinofsky’s passing, Berlinger directed Netflix’s highly controversial Jeffrey Dahmer biopic, continuing his love of spectacle.

Berlinger and Sinofsky were attracted to William Ward’s murder, and Delbert’s trial, not because of events themselves, but because of the media circus surrounding them. The four Ward brothers farmed their ancestral patch outside Munnsville, a central New York village that (to judge by this film) has few residents younger than forty. The Wards themselves had lived their entire lives on the farm, with electricity but no running water.

Our filmmakers struggle to let the Ward brothers tell their own stories. Problem is, the Ward brothers aren’t very helpful. While Berlinger and Sinofsky’s interview subjects mostly interact well with the camera and explain themselves in measured tones, Delbert Ward and his brothers, Lyman and Roscoe, are visibly uncomfortable. The documentarians have to leave their questions in the edit, because the Ward brothers consistently give uncomfortable one-word answers.

Much media speculation around the Ward murder, as recounted in this documentary, centers on the Wards’ simple lifestyles. Slick-suited downstate journalists loved to interview the brothers, and their neighbors, keeping them centered on camera so the world could hear their regional accents and see their paucity of teeth. None of the brothers ever married; though they seem amiable with Munnsville women, there’s little evidence any has ever had a relationship.

By contrast, Berlinger and Sinofsky aim their cameras at the journalists and their polished crews. While urbane news crews in fashionable late-eighties businesswear get multiple takes to perfect their location shoots, they let Delbert Ward ramble incoherently, and broadcast the first take. Berlinger and Sinofsky show the contrast between supercilious journalists, and the way Munnsville’s people close ranks to protect Delbert Ward, whom they consider a neighbor.

Delbert Ward (right) and his attorney, as they hear the verdict

Unfortunately, Munnsville’s attitude toward the Wards proves as patronizing as the city slickers. Several Munnsville residents give on-camera interviews, but fumble through their cliched, condescending narratives of “neighbors” they clearly don’t know well. Several Munnsville residents spin fictional justifications of why Delbert couldn’t possibly be guilty, or why he is, but it’s secretly okay. Many describe the Ward brothers as simple-minded, rusticating, and possibly mentally disabled.

That last characterization proves prescient when Delbert’s defense attorney deploys it in his opening argument. Ralph Cognetti literally claims Delbert couldn’t have murdered William because he’s too simple-minded—the same argument the nameless defense attorney uses in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying. Delbert’s attorney, his neighbors, and distant supporters defend him using the same accusation the state uses: these are just hill people, with all the stereotypes.

New York state police based their entire argument on two facts: William’s body had petechial hemorrhaging, and Delbert signed a confession. (They also claim they found semen on William’s corpse, a lurid detail presumably used to bait the media, since it’s never pursued further.) The problem with Delbert’s signed confession is, by his own admission, Delbert can barely read. His entire understanding of justice comes from watching Matlock.

Berlinger and Sinofsky follow the Ward brothers and their Munnsville neighbors through the months preceding the trial, and the trial itself. Their depiction of a murder trial is chilling. Stripped of Dick Wolf’s beloved melodrama, the process appears degrading and spiteful. Lyman Ward handles cross-examination so poorly, I briefly thought he’d died on the stand. It’s enough to make one wonder whether trials are about justice at all.

It spoils nothing to admit: Delbert is acquitted, but not exonerated. This movie isn’t about the outcome anyway. It’s about the conflict between outsiders and the community, the way downstate police and prosecutors (and their media allies) hunted for a murderer before proving a murder actually happened, while the working-class community closed ranks to defend their own. The product is chilling, an indictment of the justice system itself.

India’s History and the War for the Soul

1001 Films To Watch Before Your Nexflix Subscription Dies, Part 48
Santosh Sivan (director), Ashoka

Prince Ashoka has become the most successful general in the Mauryan Empire, a claim he makes despite, not because of, his royal standing. A younger son of a lesser queen in the Emperor’s harem, nobody expects Ashoka to inherit, least of all his favored brother Susima. When Susima deliberately refuses to support his brother in battle, Ashoka manages a massive strategic victory, then returns to the capitol, intent on vengeance.

World cinema should, ideally, offer ambitious audiences an opportunity to immerse themselves in somebody else’s culture for a few hours. Unfortunately, Hollywood’s carcinogenic influence has undercut that recently; filmmakers must appeal to English-speaking audiences to make bank. This Hindi-language movie therefore makes an interesting contradiction. It embraces the full vaudeville cheese inherent in Bollywood masterpieces, while striving to tell an important story of historical and cultural significance.

Despite his military proficiency, Ashoka proves less capable of palace intrigue. His initial plans for vengeance against Susima and his other brothers fails, and he narrowly avoids an attempted assassination. At his mother’s insistence, Ashoka flees the palace, posing as a commoner and sleeping rough. This experience teaches Ashoka important lessons in humility, but it also gives him a long-overdue opportunity for love, when he meets Kaurwaki, exiled princess of Kalinga.

Shahrukh Khan, India’s biggest matinee idol, plays Ashoka in a manner Western audiences might find jarring. One moment, he has smoldering, Brad Pitt-like charisma and an understated performance, stone-faced and impassive, the character happening entirely in his eyes.The next moment, he turns into a caricature, chewing scenery with the aplomb of Gary Oldman. No matter his tone, he always carries a sure and placid confidence in his star power.

These tonal shifts reflect the Bollywood culture that birthed this movie. Bollywood has certain requirements. For instance, every movie requires five tightly choreographed song-and-dance routines. Four routines directly advance or comment on the plot; the fifth is pure lowbrow spectacle. Americanized audiences unfamiliar with Bollywood convention may feel back-footed when the prince begins singing and dancing for the first time. But that confusion is half the fun.

Ashoka is an important figure in Indian history. He pushed the Mauryan Empire to its greatest geographical expanse, and he sponsored massive artistic and public-works projects. Many of his surviving artworks are among India’s national treasures, and have weathered 2,300 years remarkably intact. But at his empire’s peak, he converted to Buddhism, foreswore violence, and rededicated his empire to helping India’s most defenseless peoples. History doesn’t exactly record why.

Kareena Kapoor as Princess Kaurwaki and Shahrukh Khan as Prince Ashoka

This movie speculates on the forces leading to Ashoka’s conversion. The resulting mix is both personal and national, both contemporary and historical. Ashoka’s life among the poor and destitute reflects the Buddha’s own mythological journey outside the palace walls. But his personal romance with a foreign princess reflects important modern concerns, that while Ashoka was a product of his times, he also rejected those times for deeply personal reasons.

Director Santosh Sivan directs this picture in ways that reflect Ashoka’s dualism. He designs his shots with Peter Jackson-like simplicity that makes the Iron Age setting come alive. The Mauryan palace has timber frames and beaten metal ornaments that bespeak both poverty and ambition. Important character moments happen while Ashoka hides out in windswept caverns and candlelit temples. Shadows cut deep across his face as he chews up his enemies.

And chew them up he does. Sivan recreates military conquest in images that would make Cecil B. DeMille envious. The movie cuts from conversations inside stone-walled taverns to massive cavalry charges as quickly and effortlessly as Ashoka’s military lifestyle requires. Ashoka’s relationship with his bodyguard Virat begins with slapstick that would make American directors flinch, and concludes in truly heartbreaking tragedy.

The contrast of tones, not only within the movie but within principal characters from scene to scene, creates a jarring disjunction that English-speaking audiences might find uncomfortable. Sivan includes broad physical comedy in a tragic film, and religious rumination in a war epic. Western audiences aren’t accustomed to such juxtaposition. This film dropped in 2001, about the time American TV and movies shifted to whispered dialog and solemn, unsmiling faces.

However, that very juxtaposition bolsters this movie’s themes. Sure, Ashoka lived around the same time as Alexander the Great, and we’d consider him ancient. But the concerns that forced him to reject empire and embrace transcendence, aren’t only located in the past. Ashoka laughs, gets drunk, and adores his mother; he also gives reign to murderous rages and destroys entire nations. Because ultimately, so do we.

Take This Badge Off Of Me

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 47
Sam Peckinpah, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett (James Coburn) swaggers into the old Spanish mission where the outlaws congregate, showing off his newly minted badge. Not long ago, he was one among this anarchic bunch, but the territorial government has empowered him to bring law to the frontier. Garrett warns his old friend William Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) that the government wants Garrett specifically to bring down Bonney. Here’s your first and only warning, Garrett says: get out or get killed.

I remember first watching this movie as a teenager, impelled by the reputation of director Sam Peckinpah, and by this movie’s famous soundtrack, composed and recorded by Bob Dylan. The classic “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” comes from this movie. As a kid, I was appalled by this movie. I watched as it ticked down a list of traditional Western character tropes, all of whom died in the kind of bloodbath for which Peckinpah is famous.

What I didn’t understand, watching it with a kid’s wide-eyed situational ignorance, was the context in which this movie was made. Peckinpah himself had become an unlikely countercultural hero. Though twenty years older than his principal audience, he understood their Vietnam-era malaise. He also understood the self-destructive violence which drove characters in mercilessly explosive classics like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, as he feuded with production houses and self-medicated to control his bipolar disorder.

William Bonney, good-looking and rife with charm, ignores his friend’s warnings. He came west to escape Back-East law, and reinvented himself as Billy the Kid. For him, outlaw status isn’t a failure to obey the law; it’s an act of obedience to his truest self. He believes the frontier myth of complete autonomy; he sees the West as Rousseau’s “state of nature.” Billy scorns Garrett, leaves the mission, and returns to his career of rampage.

But if Billy has become the amoral extreme of libertarian thinking, Garrett has become the opposite. By accepting a badge, he also accepts the Back-East government’s strict Calvinist interpretation of law. Humankind, he now believes, is irredeemably sinful, and must be restrained by law. As a lawman, his right to enforce order upon everyone else is absolute, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in pursuing that goal. Law is Garret’s goal, not a means.

Kris Kristofferson (left) and James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Here’s where my teenage self reacted with initial revulsion. Raised in an atmosphere of country music, John Wayne movies, and Zane Grey novels, I believed American Western myths of hard-bitten individualism and frontier pluck. Peckinpah chooses the most extreme versions of that mythology: the strict lawman who believes the frontier must be tamed, and the wild-eyed outlaw who glories in the absence of law. The two must fight, and destroy everyone who comes between them.

I failed to understand the context. Peckinpah released this movie in 1973, the same year America’s involvement in Vietnam juddered to an unsatisfying halt. The American myth had devolved into extremes, not dissimilar to those depicted onscreen, and likewise destroyed everything that came between them. Even Bob Dylan’s involvement, as both composer and strange, enigmatic character, served to repudiate the entire previous decade. He’d been reduced to “Alias,” a character with no name or loyalties.

And yes, Peckinpah destroyed every Western stereotype. I saw that correctly, but utterly misinterpreted it. In one memorable scene, veteran cowboy actor Slim Pickens plays a sheriff conscripted into Garrett’s posse. A gunfight ensues, and Pickens is gut-shot. The camera lingers over him trying to hold his entrails in, eyes wide, while his wife tries to comfort him. The iconic Western character is dying, and knows it.

Pickens would parody this trope the next year, in Blazing Saddles.

Unlike in Peckinpah’s earlier films, made when he was relatively sober, these characters have limited motivations. Unlike, say, David Sumner in Straw Dogs, Billy and Garrett don’t learn or change with the story; they simply possess absolute morals, and kill to support them. But like jazz, this movie isn’t about what it’s about. Billy and Garrett don’t learn, but everyone caught between them certainly does. The lessons are cold, and usually final.

I misunderstood this at 17, because my upbringing strictly refused to accept the lessons of the post-Vietnam era. Worse, looking around today, watching my country getting shredded by a similar adherence to absolute morals, I see I wasn’t the only one who didn’t learn. Today’s moralists even use the same cowboy imagery I grew up with. And now, like then, those who follow absolute morals aren’t hurt, but those caught between them are getting killed.

The Truth, the State, and Store-Bought Justice

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 46
Michael Apted (director), Gorky Park

Three corpses lie buried in snow in Moscow’s most popular amusement park. Evidence suggests they were shot in broad daylight, two of them more than once, yet somehow nobody noticed. Then, when a curious KGB officer with no regard for procedure partially uncovers them, they reveal their most grisly sacred: the bodies have been mutilated, their faces and fingertips flensed. No way of knowing who they were.

The film noir tradition has its history in places of moral degradation and political malaise: Vichy France, London’s dockyards, McCarthyite America. Working from a novel by Martin Cruz Smith, director Michael Apted applies the same principles to Soviet Moscow. Apted leads us through a world where politicians love ideology but don’t live by it, where money greases the Cold War’s wheels, and evidence doesn’t determine truth, the state does.

Chief Inspector Arkady Renko (William Hurt) tries to unload the Gorky Park murders onto the KGB, not because he believes the murders are political, but because the KGB so clearly doesn’t want them. He’s accustomed to turf battles with state enforcement, so the state’s hasty acquiescence worries him. Especially when the autopsy reveals that at least one anonymous corpse belongs to an American national, an oddity in Soviet Russia.

Despite the Soviet Union’s society nominally being undivided by class, Renko is something of Moscow aristocracy. His superiors repeatedly name-check his father, a war hero, which probably explains why he outranks officers significantly older than him. Renko has, however, chosen a career in the Militsiya, the nationalized Soviet civilian police force, a dimly regarded profession for a member of the nomenklatura. This causes suspicion among an already distrustful bureaucratic hierarchy.

That same hierarchy quickly introduces Renko to Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), an American importer. Osborne wears slick suits, seems chummy with Moscow’s swells, and sleeps with much younger Russian women. When Osborne starts asking pointed questions about Renko’s investigation, Renko starts suspecting Osborne’s motivations. It seems Moscow’s chief prosecutor might share those suspicions, and urges Renko to investigate further.

Martin Cruz Smith wrote the original novel after spending several weeks in Moscow in the late 1970s. His book, and Apted’s subsequent movie, were condemned as anti-Soviet propaganda, and banned by the pre-Glasnost state. However, in fairness, Smith’s American characters hardly emerge smelling like roses. When Jack Osborne transparently bribes Soviet officials, those officials buy in hastily, making Osborne complicit in state-based suppression of facts.

Lee Marvin (left) and William Hurt at the big reveal of Gorky Park

Besides Osborne, another American begins probing the investigation. William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy) lurks around the crime scene’s periphery, but when Renko approaches, Kirwill rabbit-punches him and runs. Renko, his curiosity piqued, searches Kirwill’s hotel room, where he finds a gold-plated badge. Seems Kirwill, like Renko, is a homicide detective, NYPD. Renko quickly reminds Kirwill this isn’t his patch, and confiscates the badge.

Throughout the movie, the Moscow nomenklatura remind one another that Renko is one of Russia’s best homicide investigators. Quickly, however, we discover what “best” means. He casually lies to informants, threatens witnesses, and carries an unregistered sidearm. Despite showing no ambition to rise in the Soviet state, a tendency which worries his power-hungry superiors, Renko mixes a strong belief in justice, with a casual disregard for procedure and tedium.

Renko’s attitude arises from his circumstances. He learned early that powerful people manipulate rules, that the state’s ideological rigidity doesn’t translate into honesty. The same Soviet enforcers who censor media and redistribute private property, maintain a background life of lavish parties and under-the-table financial dealings. They attempt to break up the back-alley black market economy, while maintaining the exact same practices in their gilded offices and lavish country dachas.

Apted’s physical design emphasizes the movie’s moral themes. His Moscow (mostly shot in Helsinki, Finland) is constantly saturated with light. This illumination doesn’t make anything clearer, though: reflected off concrete buildings and mounded snow, Moscow’s constant sunlight is more blinding than enlightening. William Hurt squints into this overlit streetscape with the intensity of a man who loves and defends his people, but has clearly come to hate his city.

In some ways, this movie is distinctly dated. Its Reagan-era anti-Soviet propaganda, backed with James Horner’s melodramatic score, clearly belongs to the early 1980s. But in other ways, with its intrusive government that dictates policy, and its police who guard order without underlying principles of justice, this movie clearly describes our present. It’s easy to see ourselves, and the authorities who dictate our lives, portrayed in this film.

Because really, in forty years, neither post-Soviet Russia nor America has learned very much.

The Benefits of Becoming a Psychopath

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 45
Peter Weir (director) & Rafael Yglesias (writer), Fearless

Business executive Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) has become a media icon after being photographed walking unharmed away from a major airplane crash. Other survivors extol his bravery, his calming influence, and his leadership under pressure. But questions start surfacing: why is Max averse to answering FAA investigators’ questions? Why is he reluctant to contact his wife and son? What’s with his strange obsession with fellow survivor Carla Rodrigo (Rosie Perez)?

Australian filmmaker Peter Weir’s American career has fluctuated wildly. At times, he’s made critical and commercial darlings like Witness and Dead Poets Society; other times he’s favored more hermetic content, like The Mosquito Coast, or this strange outing. Based on a novel by Rafael Yglesias, who also adapted the screenplay, this movie became a critical darling, but went almost unwatched by general audiences. Which is a crying shame.

What’s the opposite of a traumatic reaction? Because that’s what Max has. Surviving a catastrophe against all odds, he suddenly becomes convinced nothing can hurt him. He contacts an old girlfriend and reopens old wounds; to showcase his perceived invincibility, he eats a strawberry in front of her, despite a lifelong allergy. Both events prove him right. Despite risking further hurting himself, physically and psychologically, he emerges unscathed.

The people around Max don’t share his enthusiasm. His wife Laura (Isabella Rossellini) watches his showboating antics with increasing perplexity. The widow of Max’s business partner (Deirdre O’Connell), who didn’t survive, demands answers, but Max proves evasive, refusing to explain his actions during the crash. People who once loved and trusted Max watch him behaving like a stranger and can only watch, tearfully, as his grandiosity becomes dangerous.

Only Carla continues to enjoy Max’s confidence. Though strangers before the crash, their survivor status creates a bond that transforms them both. Except, where Max believes himself invincible, Carla has become paralyzed with near-constant terror. And with good reason: though she walked away without a scratch, her baby, flying unsecured before child safety seats became mandatory, was killed. Carla believes herself a failure as a mother and a woman.

The airline’s pet psychologist, Dr. Perlman (John Turturro), begins shadowing Max and Carla, trying to understand their perverse bond. There’s no indication these two, who are both married, have a romantic connection; they seem more like brother and sister. But as they become more engrossed with their shared trauma, and their reactions become more like images in a funhouse mirror, Perlman worries they’re compounding one another’s injuries.

Jeff Bridges walks nonchalantly away from disaster in Fearless

Critics have acclaimed Jeff Bridges’ performance in this movie. As Max, he moves from mere confidence, to aplomb, to almost messianic grandiosity, his faith in his own indestructibility making him loud and swaggering. Paradoxically, the more unbreakable he believes himself, the less empathy Max has for others. He simply can’t see how his reckless actions impact others. He is becoming, in short, psychopathic.

Weir and Yglesias’ storytelling turns on the failure of absolute moral thinking. Max thinks he doesn’t need to fear anything anymore, which makes him destructive to anyone around him. Meanwhile Carla, plagued with survivors’ guilt, sees reason to fear in every circumstance. Both become extreme versions of their former selves, and importantly, each thinks they need to “cure” the other. They’re unable to find balance between their moral extremes.

Throughout most of the movie, we don’t see something very important: the crash itself. Though the moments before and after transform everyone involved, and their families, we don’t see the actual event. Because we only understand the catastrophe through its survivors’ reports, we wonder who to trust. (This is only compounded when Max’s attorney encourages him to exaggerate what happened, to extract a lucrative settlement from the airline.)

Only when Max and Carla address the catastrophe directly do we see what happened—and, in that moment, we finally see the truth our protagonists can’t admit to themselves. We finally start seeing Weir and Yglesias’ themes emerge, of how human life is balanced between destructive extremes. Fear and bravery, individual and community, control and luck. Our characters have flailed badly because they’re unable to find the balance between extremes.

Again, this movie collapsed on release. Its weird, philosophical premise didn’t permit TV-friendly marketing, and admittedly, its final three minutes flinch from their possible conclusions. Yet artistically, it remains a high point for its participants’ careers, a moment they committed themselves to something ambiguous, even dangerous, and stridently uncommercial. It pushes its characters to the poles of human limit, then encourages us to help them work their way back home.

What If the 1950s, But Sillier?

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 44
Walter Hill (writer-director), Streets of Fire

Glamorous rock star Ellen Aim has returned to her hometown to play a benefit gig before an adoring local crowd. But jealous biker Raven, leader of the Bombers, has other goals: his black-clad greasers rush the stage, overpower Ellen’s entourage, and carry her away like a trophy. Thousands watch helplessly, but one local woman contacts her secret weapon, her brother, the mercenary Tom Cody.

Director and co-writer Walter Hill produced this picture, an epitome of 1980s values, in the immediate wake of his runaway hit 48 Hrs. A slick package of highly choreographed fight scenes, teenage love revisited, and rock aesthetics, everyone involved anticipated another smash. It was dead on arrival, losing millions. Recent trends, however, have led critics to reevaluate this movie, reclassifying it as an ahead-of-its-time beauty of Reagan-era excess.

Tom Cody declares he doesn’t care to rescue Ellen Aim. Why get involved in local gangs and police politics? Some banter with his sister reveals Tom and Ellen were involved, years prior, but when her singing career became lucrative, they drifted apart. Tom carries a grudge. But Ellen’s nebbishy boyfriend, also her manager, offers a brick of cash, and Tom becomes interested. He buys some black-market guns and ventures into the darkest part of town.

Despite its dark premise, this movie’s defining trait is silliness. It presents all action with the depth and complexity of a Looney Tune. Its outdoor sets and streetscapes are so close-in and narrow that you never forget it’s a soundstage. Characters are exactly as deep as the plot requires, letting the script carry them from scene to scene, because they don’t have deep inner motivations; things simply happen because it’s time.

Yet somehow, we viewers feel yoked to the story’s potential. The silliness becomes downright operatic, with its tendency towards Grand Guignol and its elaborate, Tim Burton-like design. Like vintage melodrama, the characters are having enough fun that they see no reason to interrupt the proceedings. They want things to reach their inevitable conclusion because they enjoy being slick, commercial, and drenched in early-MTV sumptuousness.

In essence, this movie is a designer’s vehicle; even the rococo sets remind us we’re participating in conscious art. The nameless city’s streets have an Edward Hopper depth, very close and angular, with bare concrete under painted steel facades (which are clearly plastic and Styrofoam). Like in a dream, or myth, everything is very close together: the city’s worst street is around the corner from its best.

Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) and Tom Cody (Michael Paré) in Streets of Fire

A 1950s aesthetic pervades this film, but not deeply. Shark-fin cars and greaser boots are everywhere, but so are upswept 1980s hairdos and oversaturated music-video colors. An early title card tells us this story happens in “Another time, another place.” That time and place is clearly inside somebody’s head, because this isn’t historic; it's a Reagan-era dreamscape fueled by Top-40 skifflebop and anti-juvenile delinquent PSA’s.

Then we have the fight scenes, for which this movie was written. Unnamed characters fall off motorcycles, get whanged with sledgehammers, and tumble out of moving cars, but nobody is ever really hurt. Like I said, it’s a Looney Tune, a Bugs Bunny caper. We don’t expect realistic consequences for cartoon violence, we expect people’s heads to bounce off pavement like it’s made of rubber. Violence is slapstick, not horrific.

This pervasive silliness is underscored by the movie’s rock-and-roll soundtrack, which almost never stops. Its rockabilly vibes remind us we’re watching somebody’s nostalgic fantasy. (This is the same era when the Stray Cats and the Cramps updated Fifties vibes for a more commercial age.) This movie pines for fast guitars, slick cars, and back-alley rumbles. Like much of its era, it yearns for a simplicity that probably never really existed.

This movie plays out a Reaganite wistfulness for a simplified 1950s, divided between obvious heroes and villains. It pits calm, big-shouldered Tom Cody, the ex-soldier, against greaser Raven and his gangsters; but it also pits Tom’s demonstrative manfulness against Billy Fish, Ellen’s geeky manager and new boyfriend. Tom’s violence works, but it’s also outdated; even he admits the future belongs to people like Billy, not himself.

As stated, this movie landed with a quiet thud. This didn’t bother writer-director Hill, who was massively prolific and moved onto another project. Nearly forty years later, though, fans have reevaluated its legacy. It has more in common with mythologies like Lord of the Rings than the semi-realistic action flicks which dominated 1980s cinema, while also embodying its era’s pining for lost moral simplicity. And it’s also just silly fun.

New Delhi’s Romantic Rain Opera

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 43
Mira Nair (director), Monsoon Wedding

Beautiful, fresh-faced Aditi Verma returns to her family’s lush New Delhi manor, to participate in an arranged marriage. The Verma family, wealthy and urbane, see this wedding as an opportunity to display their affluence to the extended family, returning home from living scattered in several nations. Only the family patriarch, Lalit Verma, knows he’s actually broke, financing everything on credit. Aditi, meanwhile, hasn’t broken up with her previous boyfriend yet.

According to reputation, screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan wrote this movie hastily, to have something she could workshop for her MFA program. One of her professors, expatriate Indian director Mira Nair, saw something promising in it. Nair set out to realize Dhawan’s story as a combination of an American low-budget indie film, and a Bollywood spectacular. The result straddles two worlds efficiently, capturing the hybrid world of India’s moneyed gentry.

Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah, Gandhi) is a control freak, desperate for a traditional Punjabi wedding. What he really wants, though, is a sleek tourist destination. After all, his family only gets together about once every ten years, and the groom’s family is rich, with connections to American money. Only when Lalit’s credit starts bouncing does he realize he’s tied his personal money into his business, which is critically overextended.

The wedding planner, Dubey, catches the bulk of Lalit’s copious wrath. To his credit, Dubey, a happy-go-lucky kid with seemingly boundless energy and elbows like hatchets, remains unfazed. Until, that is, he glimpses Alice, the Vermas’ patient, doe-eyed housemaid. Alice’s hard work and infinite grace keep the Verma household together, and Dubey realizes he’s become dependent on her to organize this wedding. Maybe he’s starting to feel something more, too.

Aditi, in her middle twenties, agrees to a traditional arranged marriage, to a man she’s only known a few weeks, largely because she realizes it’s advantageous. Her boyfriend, after all, is married. But she has aspirations of being a modern, Westernized woman, like the glamorous Indians living abroad she sees on television. How can she explain to her fiance that she isn’t going to be a traditional Punjabi wife?

Meanwhile Ria, Aditi’s cousin, has thrown herself whole-heartedly into helping Aditi’s wedding preparations. She seems excited for everything happening, until Lalit’s brother-in-law, Tej, arrives from America. Everyone thinks Tej is perfectly avuncular and welcomes him, especially when he offers to cover Ria’s university tuition in America. So why has Ria become suddenly sullen and withdrawn, lashing out at family members with little provocation?

If this seems like a remarkable number of plot threads, I won’t disagree. Like many American indie filmmakers, Dhawan and Nair create an ensemble whose various individual needs are often in conflict; we know somebody is bound for disappointment. The characters achieve their needs only by wheedling and compromising. We wait with anticipation to see how the movie will land all these divergent threads with satisfaction.

Alongside the ordinary, human conflicts, the movie also includes India’s stark economic contrasts. Most of the movie happens on the Verma family’s large gated compound, a spectacle of post-colonial opulence. But to accomplish anything, the characters must venture into streets crowded with cars and beggars. Alice, the maid, lives in a polite but easily ignored cottage on the periphery. Dubey, the wedding planner, lives in a loud, cruddy walk-up flat.

Culture clash dominates. Aditi has lived in New Delhi all her life, but everyone expects she’ll move to Texas with her new husband, which she anticipates with dread. Dubey, clearly Hindu and proud, falls in love with Alice, who sleeps with a crucifix above her bed. Most of the movie’s dialog is in colonial English, and Lalit Verma desperately tries to appear British, but bursts of Hindi appear so often, the movie requires subtitles.

Overall, the movie follows a standard Bollywood beat sheet. It translates these beats, however, for audiences more accustomed to Western cinematic traditions. The song-and-dance breaks for which Bollywood is famous, are replaced by introspective long shots where the sounds of New Delhi come together in almost operatic unity. The love stories resolve themselves concisely, without ever showing anything the state censorship board would consider naughty.

Personally, I was recommended this movie by a clerk at an Indian grocery store. Fascinated by his store’s rack of Bollywood DVDs, I asked for suggestions to get started. He recommended this movie as a good introduction for audiences raised on Western cinema. Because it has its feet firmly planted in two worlds, and explains itself clearly, it proved a perfect introduction for one inquisitive Westerner.

Kevin Kline and the New(ish) Deal

1001 Movies To See Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 42
Ivan Reitman (director), Dave

William Harrison Mitchell and Dave Kovic live in completely different worlds. Though both occupy Washington, DC, President Mitchell is an angry, dishonest schemer. Humble Dave, by contrast, runs a jobs placement agency in Georgetown, and moonlights as a President Mitchell impersonator. This sideline draws official attention, because the White House needs a body double to protect Mitchell’s extramarital affairs.

Czech-born Canadian director Ivan Reitman spent the 1980s directing “Little Guy Makes Good” movies like Stripes and Ghostbusters. The 1990s, however, shifted his outlook—this movie dropped just four months into Bill Clinton’s presidency. Though Clinton superficially looked like an Ivan Reitman character come to life, his infidelities were already widely rumored, and he had a notorious off-camera temper. Reitman latched onto this duality and ran.

Dave (Kevin Kline), a natural ham with a big heart, thinks his top-level assignment is a one-night stand. However, President Mitchell (also Kline) suffers a catastrophic stroke mid-coitus with a junior White House staffer. So Chief of Staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) contracts Dave as the President’s stand-in, to avoid scandal. Alexander successfully corralled Mitchell’s ambitions and anger for years, so he figures a schmendrick like Dave will be easy.

White House officials take Dave on official photo ops, letting his winning smile and telegenic charm smooth passage of party-line bills. Dave is, at first, happy to let Alexander run the actual presidency. However, Alexander’s ham-fisted budget cuts soon jeopardize a project close to Dave’s heart. Turns out, Dave actually believes the optimistic message behind which President Mitchell got elected; he has no patience with Washington’s official cynicism.

So Dave does what comes naturally to him: he enlists the camera’s aide. While Bob Alexander writes policy in a locked room (and President Mitchell lies comatose in an unlisted clinic), Dave conducts Cabinet-level log-rolling sessions on primetime network news. With all American watching, Dave soon swings White House policy to match the official rhetoric. Alexander, long the power behind the throne, finds himself out in the cold.

This movie’s comments about President Clinton’s personal life, some of which seem almost prescient, could easily overshadow its comments about his policies. Clinton secured the Democratic nomination, in 1992, partly by promising to deepen and extend President Reagan’s draconian cuts to America’s social safety net. Given Clinton’s “Man From Hope” oratory, it’s easy to forget he promised “the end of welfare as we know it” during his longshot primary campaign.

Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver in Ivan Reitman's Dave

Nobody seems more surprised by Dave’s sifting priorities than First Lady Ellen Mitchell (Sigourney Weaver). Though the Mitchells maintained a unified front for the camera, Bill’s infidelities, and his willingness to compromise his principles, long since drove Ellen away. They remain married because it serves their shared ambitions: he wants power, she wants to do actual good in the world. Ellen, unaware of Bill’s stroke, suspects Dave is a chameleon.

The brewing conflict between Dave and Alexander soon reaches boiling point. Alexander has blackmail data enough to see Dave arrested, but Dave has the nation’s sympathies. Trapped in a cycle of mutually assured destruction, we only wonder which will unseat the other first. Chronic liar Alexander has the ability to destroy Dave simply by telling the truth; pathologically honest Dave finds himself keeping secrets almost as well as Alexander.

Reitman heightens his political realism by incorporating real-life figures from 1990s politics. Politicians like Tip O’Neill, Tom Harkin, and Paul Simon (not that one), provide unscripted commentary on Dave’s New Deal-esque policies. Meanwhile, outside commentators like Jay Leno and the entire McLaughlin Group provide the media response. These make it clear that Dave’s candid politics would face stark criticism in real Washington.

There’s also a critical subtext to this movie: it’s easy to sympathize with Dave. He’s uncontrived, loves children and puppies, and fights for his beliefs. But he didn’t get elected President; Bill Mitchell did, with his moral compromises and smoke-filled rooms. We like Dave, but Reitman asks us: would we vote for him? Considering what candidates we Americans habitually support, Reitman’s answer is implicit, but painfully obvious.

We Americans love bellyaching about how politicians’ rhetoric doesn’t match their actions. But we do nothing about it. Ivan Reitman throws that back on us. Dave Kovic actually accomplishes the promises we Americans claim to approve, but accomplishes them under Bill Mitchell’s name. American politics, Reitman implies, requires professionals with Jekyll-and-Hyde personalities. As long as that’s what we vote for, that’s what we’ll get.

Yet the final scene suggests we aren’t doomed. We could change; Reitman encourages us to do so.

Locked in a Brain Cell

1001 Movies To See Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 41
Travis Milloy (writer-director), Infinity Chamber

Frank Lerner awakens in a spit-shined, glossy prison cell. He has no recollection how he arrived, or when. His only contact is Howard, a corrections officer he only meets through a suspended security camera. Frank struggles to reconstruct events leading to his arrest, hoping to return to real life. But Howard has orders: he must interrogate Frank, using complex hallucinogenic stimulators. Howard, Frank realizes, is a computer.

Writer-director Travis Milloy creates a moody, smothering dystopia of constant surveillance, which is more remarkable for his limited budget. He shot this movie for less than most Hollywood productions spend on hair and makeup. He completely eschewed digital effects, using Hitchcock-like camera techniques to conceal his simple, practical design. The product looks sleek and expensive, and more polished than some recent big-studio extravaganzas.

Desperate for information, Frank agrees to strategic horse-trades with Howard. He submits to interrogations, provided Howard shares whatever data he can. These interrogations involve putting Frank into a trance and returning him to the hours before his arrest. In return, Howard shares… not much. Almost every question returns the answer “I can’t access that information, Frank.” As he constantly reminds Frank, Howard can only do what he’s programmed to do.

Frank’s trances, meanwhile, become increasingly intricate. Howard keeps returning Frank to a Los Angeles café, and a fleeting encounter with a pretty barista, Gabby. However, Frank doesn’t merely repeat the same memory. He quickly begins manipulating events, prying his own recall for details. (“Frank” is an ironic name; we learn he’s far from forthcoming. “Lerner” is loaded, too.) Soon, he controls the interrogation sessions, or anyway he thinks he does.

Christopher Soren Kelly, as Frank, paces his narrow cell, arguing with Howard, conveying both urgency and claustrophobia with only a few repeating movements. Kelly’s performance suggests a young Al Pacino, before he started shouting almost every role. Jesse D. Arrow plays Howard with a passive-aggressive air that barely conceals his menace, accentuated by restless “body language” from his security camera. We almost forget the actor isn’t onscreen.

Frank Lerner (Christopher Soren Kelly) strategizes his escape in Infinity Chamber

On one level, this movie unpacks themes familiar from more iconic productions, like The Matrix and Dark City. Frank begins to question the evidence of his senses, because the hallucinations Howard produces are so elaborate, he can’t distinguish the borders of reality. However, we don’t simply rehash those Hollywood standards. This movie cares more about issues of power and authority, and our ability to make informed decisions in civil society.

Because, we learn from Frank’s interrogations, he lives in a pervasive surveillance state. Pedestrians find themselves constantly harangued by spy drones, and cash registers have built-in retinal scanners. Made shortly after Edward Snowden pantsed President Obama’s NSA, this movie stresses that it’s not possible to dance the line between security and freedom, because there’s no line. Powerful institutions always use “security” to bolster their dominion over us peons.

Frank maintains two relationships throughout this movie. He becomes amiable with Howard, his jailer, and they even begin calling each other friends. Howard starts helping Frank, asking prodding questions that unlock troubling memories. Meanwhile, as Frank manipulates his hallucinations, his memory of the barista, Gabby, becomes self-aware, and they develop a romance. Subtle visual cues, however, suggest this romance is just another top-level power play.

We learn America, outside Frank’s prison cell, is undergoing a revolution. Massed citizens, angry about official hypocrisy and abuse, have turned violent, and the state has retaliated. But, like in more conservative revolutionary films, this rebellion is mainly reported, not witnessed. We care more about individuals and their choices, than big, sweeping themes. While America struggles to throw off state power, Frank struggles to reclaim individual autonomy, with mixed success.

Milloy maintains a careful balance throughout this film. Frank and Howard argue and explain, while Frank and Gabby strategize, two complex ballets of verbal complexity. However, Milloy salts the movie with visual clues that the topics Frank discusses verbally, only scratch the surface of reality. The tension between what Frank says, and what Frank fails to see, comes to a sudden but remarkably subdued peak in the movie’s final scene.

Some critics suggest this movie is occasionally overlong. I suggest those critics weren’t paying attention. Even in scenes where the movie appears to turn thoughtful and languid, it plants seeds which bloom later. In a science fiction environment that has become cluttered with Star Wars or the MCU, with their love of explosions, this movie relies on character arcs and attentive audiences. Not one moment in this film is wasted.

Is This the Best Right-Wing Film Ever?

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 40
John Milius (writer/director), Red Dawn

You already know the story: Soviet paratroopers descend upon an unsuspecting Colorado town during the local high school’s first period. The invasion is swift and decisive. Six teens, representing six personality types—jocks, rich kids, brains, et cetera—flee into the Rocky Mountain foothills, equipped with rudimentary survival gear and assault rifles. After a brief period of indecision, they begin their insurgency against the invaders. Which tired, combat-hardened kids will survive to see liberated America?

It’s sometimes difficult to appreciate exactly how conservative Hollywood’s 1980s Brat Pack movement was. The trend was spearheaded by screenwriter John Hughes, in movies like Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, pictures that didn’t exactly wear their conservatism externally. These pictures, however, significantly trusted tradition and authority; they only feuded over which traditional authorities deserved teen audiences’ loyalty. This movie remains unique in broadcasting its political motivations, explicitly asserting American greatness is under threat.

The plot almost doesn’t bear recapitulation. The six teens (joined by two girls whose major contribution is being girls) organize a grassroots insurgency against the Soviet invaders and their Latin American allies. The Soviets respond with reprisals against civilian targets. Each teenager endures some traumatic personal loss, usually a dead or turncoat parent, but rather than capitulating, the kids reload and keep firing. The didactic story plays with the inevitability of a medieval morality play.

Writer-director John Milius was a classmate of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. He arose from the same New Hollywood background that informed their earliest work, and even did uncredited script-doctor work on Spielberg’s Jaws. However, while those directors drifted increasingly into broad, downmarket blockbusters, Milius became increasingly enrapt with politics. His career peak was characterized by increasingly militant right-wing pictures. This one probably stands as his personal pinnacle, and conservative Hollywood’s Reagan-era high water mark.

Importantly, Milius doesn’t pretend his story isn’t instructive. From the opening crawl, he establishes that America has grown soft through dependence on NATO. The Soviets are able to track the teenage insurgents, who christen themselves the Wolverines (their high school mascot), through ATF paperwork recovered from the sporting goods store. In his most famous visual, Milius’ camera pans from an NRA “Cold Dead Hands” sticker to its owner, smoking pistol in his cold, dead hand.

This morality isn’t accidental. Since at least Edmund Burke, philosophical conservatism has insisted that society is occupied, all goodness colonized by pervasive sin. Good people, conservative leaders insist, must constantly refine and purge their characters through violence, literal or metaphorical. Burke despised the French Revolution, but considered it necessary, as the ancien regime had grown lenient and squishy. Teddy Roosevelt suggested having wars every generation, to mold young men’s characters. Modern conservatism is inherently warlike.

For Milius, this war isn’t institutional, it’s personal. The Wolverines find an American fighter pilot surviving behind enemy lines, almost certainly a nod to Lord of the Flies. This pilot provides the teens military training; he also narrates the developments of World War III, which unfolds as pure background. The entire war happens to teach these boys, and it’s certainly about the boys, the values they must defend against Bolshevik wickedness. It’s all about individuals.

Surprisingly, for both its genre and its era, this movie doesn’t shy from hurting the characters. Where John Hughes taught teenagers important lessons about society and values by shaming them in school, John Milius wholly tortures his kids. They watch their parents tortured and murdered. One kid, the mayor’s son, discovers his father is a collaborator, proving the failures of conventional politics. Where many action films constantly protect their protagonists, Milius kills his heroes onscreen.

We cannot avoid Milius’ conclusion, which he signposts without stating it outright: we must destroy Cold War America to save it. Milius appears further Right than Ronald Reagan, who at least nominally supported diplomacy and negotiation. Where political leaders talk and make horse trades, Milius (channeling Burke) asserts that society is a bellum omnium contra omnes, and values, including American greatness, must arise from savagery. Moral goodness comes to anyone willing to destroy evil violently.

Certainly, this movie is dated. It makes assumptions about the Soviet Union’s alliances which, we now know, were patently untrue. Its battalion of teenage archetypes represents 1980s ideals that haven’t aged well. A 2012 remake, recasting the enemy as North Korea, died on arrival. We must watch this movie as an artifact of its time; but within that context, it’s a taut, well-paced introduction to conservative philosophy. It concisely forecasts the America we inherit today.