First movie/last movie: Richard Brooks

Crisis (1950)
Fever Pitch (1985)

American movies, 1970-1979

from James William Guercio's Electra Glide in Blue (1973)
This is the only film directed by musician/entrepreneur Guercio, who, at the time of filming, managed Chicago (the band, not the city) in its "25 or 6 to 4" heyday. A tribute to John Ford's Monument Valley westerns and an ironic reverse-Easy Rider biker cops vs. sleazoid counterculture creeps black comedy, the film contains a great Robert Blake performance and Conrad Hall's gorgeous cinematography. It is eye-poppingly bizarre and compelling in its fine first half before turning into a plot-heavy cliched thriller in its second half, though it manages to get nice and weird again in its final ten minutes. I saw part of it in a hotel in Alabama before the TV broke. When I tried to fix it, I found several empty airplane-sized liquor bottles behind the set. That is to say, the bottles were the size found on airplanes, not the size of airplanes. My god, imagine an alcoholic hotel maid trying to hide a Lufthansa Airbus-sized bottle of Jim Beam. What a sight. I caught up with the whole thing on DVD a few years later.

My moviegoing: 2003

from George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

Musicians on film

Musicians on film #22: The Feelies in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986)

First movie/last movie: Robert Bresson

Les anges du peche (1943)
L'argent (1983)

American movies, 1970-1979

from William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973)

My moviegoing: 2003

from Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love (2001)

Community service interlude

I'm often irritated by the lack of imagination and variety in AP celebrity obituaries, which too often latch onto one generic facet of a person's career while ignoring lots of other interesting highlights. One would think that the only two roles Patrick Swayze ever had were in Dirty Dancing and Ghost and that Henry Gibson's only contribution to culture was Laugh-In. Swayze's best movie keeps getting ignored even though it was a hit, and the majority of Gibson's career is mysteriously absent even though it's loaded with gems. Here's my small contribution to rectifying these oversights.



















My sister visited a friend in Dallas a few years ago, and they went to some bars downtown. A guy started hitting on them, and, in the course of expounding his philosophy of life, talked mostly about Patrick Swayze. He referred to Swayze as "The Swayz" and his dream was to save enough money to get a giant tattoo on his chest of The Swayz riding a surfboard in the center of the Polish flag (where his parents were from) (I'm not sure if Poland was the right country or not, but it was a European country. I think it was Poland.). I bet this man is crushed right now. Anyway, that tattoo, which I hope he finally obtained, references the best Swayze movie, curiously absent from all obituaries I've read or seen on the TV. I'm talking about Point Break, people. Point Break kicks ass. It's one of the funniest, craziest, weirdest, and most exciting big budget action movies of the 1990s. It's Kathryn Bigelow's biggest financial success (though I still think Near Dark is her best movie). It is a thing of kinetic beauty. With a cast that also includes such leaden presences as Keanu Reeves and Lori Petty, Point Break is benefited greatly by The Swayz, who keeps the whole ridiculous thing from imploding under the weight of its ambitious nuttiness. He's also very good in Donnie Darko.





























Yes, Henry Gibson was on Laugh-In, but look what else he was in, and look what else he was great in (and these are just some highlights from a long and fantastic career):
The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis)
Kiss Me, Stupid (Billy Wilder)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman)
Nashville (Robert Altman)
The Blues Brothers (John Landis)
Innerspace (Joe Dante)
the 'burbs (Joe Dante)
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Joe Dante)
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)
the voice of the eye-patched newspaper reporter Bob Jenkins on Mike Judge's TV show King of the Hill

First movie/last movie: Ingmar Bergman

Crisis (1946)
Saraband (2003)

American movies, 1970-1979

from John Frankenheimer's The Iceman Cometh (1973)

My Moviegoing: 2003

from John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960)
James Coburn retrospective: Alamo Drafthouse

First movie/last movie: Jacques Becker

Dernier atout (1942)
Le trou (1960)

Technically, Becker's first movie as a director was 1935's Tete de turc, but he disowned it, it's never come out on video or DVD, and there don't appear to be any stills from it online.

American movies, 1970-1979

from Bruce Conner's Marilyn Times Five (1973)

Musicians on film

Musicians on Film #21: Shane MacGowan and Joe Strummer (and probably another Pogue) in Alex Cox's Straight to Hell (1987), which also features the rest of the Pogues, Elvis Costello, a pre-fame Courtney Love, Grace Jones, the Circle Jerks' Zander Schloss, Ten-Pole Tudor's Edward Tudor-Pole, Sy Richardson, Dick Rude, Xander Berkeley, Jim Jarmusch, Dennis Hopper, and Miguel Sandoval.

My moviegoing: 2003

from Alexander Payne's About Schmidt (2002)

First movie/last movie: Hal Ashby

The Landlord (1970)
8 Million Ways To Die (1986)

Oddly enough, his first movie starred Beau Bridges and his last movie starred Jeff Bridges.

American movies, 1970-1979

from Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973)

My family on film

Two summers ago, I spent a long, sweaty August day in a Mexican restaurant in a hotel in Lockhart, Texas as an extra in Andrew Bujalski's latest film, Beeswax, which was then without a title. It's finally coming out soon, so the back of my head as I eat a cold taco that had been sitting out all day may or may not appear in a theater near you this fall. I was paid in barbecue that day, but it was really good barbecue, and the twin sisters playing the lead characters were very nice people. I also got free drinks for four hours at a downtown bar for the wrap party a few weeks later. Not counting the time my mother took me to the huge rock formations, Courthouse and Jail Rock, outside of my hometown to see a Kenny Rogers TV movie being filmed (I was two, I remember none of this) (maybe I dreamed this?), or the times I drove by the sets and/or on-the-street location filming of Death Proof, The Wendell Baker Story, and the remake of Friday the 13th, and also not counting the zombie movies and crime epic The Revenge of Barney Hoov I made on my parents' Camcorder, it was my only experience with the actual making of a film. I found it simultaneously interesting as hell and boring as bejesus. Anyway, my brother and mother beat me onto celluloid by a couple of decades. Back in the mid-1980s, one of the two family doctors in my hometown was a Vietnamese immigrant who'd escaped from Saigon. A documentary film crew came to my tiny hometown to shoot a segment on him for a film about immigrants in the U.S. that would eventually be shown on HBO. When they filmed him at his office, my sick little brother was his patient. My mom and brother got in the documentary, someone taped it for us when it was on HBO (my father's simultaneous love of television and paranoid fear of elusive yet constantly hovering economic disaster were at cross purposes, so the compromise was basic cable only, which meant no HBO), we watched the VHS dub, my mother complained in mild horror about how she looked on camera, and then we mostly forgot about it.
Fast forward to tonight, 2009!
I was watching the 1986 Louis Malle documentary ...And the Pursuit of Happiness on DVD tonight. It's a part of the Criterion Collection spin-off Eclipse, which presents bare-bones, economic DVDs of ultra-rare films by major directors. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to see my then-30-year-old mother and my wee little brother in the film. This was the forgotten HBO documentary! And Louis fuckin' Malle made it! Besides the thrill of seeing 23 years younger versions of my mother and brother on a Criterion Collection DVD, it was also exciting, hilarious, and slightly melancholy to see my shit-kickin', teeny-tiny Nebraska hometown beautifully shot and framed and cinematographed (not a real word) by a respected French filmmaker. Here's a picture I took of my bro and mom's scene:

My moviegoing: 2003

from Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker (1971)
James Coburn retrospective: Alamo Drafthouse

First movie/last movie: Michelangelo Antonioni

Story of a Love Affair (1950)
Beyond the Clouds (1995)