Q (1982)

Cohen is a fly-by-the-seat of his pants rebel who I wish more film brats would champion. During his commentary track Cohen astutely points out that what he once did out of necessity is now being done on purpose. I also love hearing Cohen explain that this film was born of anger. After being pulled from I, the Jury wasted no time in whipping together Q so quickly that it’s probably a good thing he never stopped to question the absurd notion of a giant Aztec bird monster nesting in the Chrysler building.

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I love this preposterous film and I don’t feel a lick of guilt. Larry Cohen can take outlandish plots and a shoestring budgets and crank out engaging and entertaining cinema. He routinely mixes genres often combining the supernatural with gritty realistic human stories, but his emphasis is always on the humans. Here a cop drama, mixes with a botched heist film, and a giant monster movie. Like most giant monster movies the finale involves a epic confrontation between man and monster.

We’ve seen this skyscraper battle before in King Kong, but in Q the battlefield is reversed. This time the monster is in the air and the humans are a top of the Chrysler building firing at the beast. As many times as I’ve seen this movie and various King Kong films, I’ve never once questioned what happens to all those bullets that did not make contact with their target? A volley of bullets is being fired into the sky and only a few make contact. Bullets have to land somewhere. They don’t just continue upward and onward into space. Look out NYC, a bullet rain’s a comin’.

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)

For me, the purpose of art lies in its remind us of the value of life, both the good and the bad, and to prepare us for the inevitable end of life. Make Way For Tomorrow does not paint a pretty picture of old age, but it is a picture resonates with our present times. An elderly couple finds themselves being evicted from their home, they are forced to move in with their children, who have no time for their parents, and by the end of the film the couple is torn further apart when one of them is sent of too California for financial and health reasons. The entire idea is soul crushing, there is a nice comedic levity, brought to the film by director Leo McCarey and a parade of writers – the screenplay was adapted from a novel, play, and poem.

Make Way For Tomorrow went on to inspire Tokyo Story, one of my all-time-favorite films. McCarey has the same delicate touch Ozu has for balancing the gravity of drama without losing site of the small comedic moments we all cling to, just to survive. I had seen other McCarey films, all of the comedies, and I suppose the old saying that comedy is harder than drama is true, still I was surprised at the emotional levels of this film. I am sure such down-beaten stories are box office gold, but I really wish McCarey could have existed in a time or system that would have allowed him to continue to explore the issue of coming to terms with life’s hardships, in the same way Ozu was allowed to do so in Japan.

During his video interview about the film, Peter Bogdanovich makes an astute point about directors like McCarey, Capra, and Ford not dreaming of being film directors when they matured, but being something else, lawyers, chemists, truck drivers, etc. Things you might call real-world jobs. He attributes this connection to the common man as being one of the reasons their films have such a strong human touch. I have to agree and I really do think a great deal of film has become an echo chamber, detached from life.

Videodrome (1983)

With this entry I begin a new catagory of posts wherein I speak of a viewing experience that includes commentary.

David Cronenberg states that James Woods is not an American film actor because he is a member of MENSA and an extremely intelligent person. Cronenberg also finds most American films to be lacking in intelligence. I can’t say I disagree with the man and should my worst fear come true, should some Hollywood producer get the grand idea to remake Videodrome I think we’ll see the proof.

What makes Videodrome so astonishing is its acute place in history; a time before the mass proliferation of home computers, before the Internet, before the multitude of ways we can plug in, log in, and live our fantasies. We’ve reached a point where two girls and cup has reached the cultural consciousness, it has gone mainstream, and without the slightest consideration of how this changes us. It’s a gag, a piece of meme, something for the 00′s Trivial Pursuit set being made as we speak.

A reworking of Videodrome done today, would simply update the technology, but not the consequences. It will be a thriller, a whodunit, a mess of mystery rapped in the latest dazzling digital technology and gross-out effects. It will be totally off the mark. Like putting young faces in old roles, Hollywood changes the only the surface and I have to agree with Cronenberg, it is not too smart.