My Favorite Movies… This Week

We were having a small, fun family dinner last week and one of our nieces wanted to know the answer to a very simple question:

What’s your #1 film?

Being who I am I had to answer a question with a question before I could answer the question.

Ummm, well, do you mean the film that I think is the best film ever made or the film that I personally like the best?

It didn’t help at all when she answered:

How about both?

Of course at this point I began explaining that either way I couldn’t narrow it down to one. There are so many different types of movies I love and watch again and again but couldn’t claim were the best for anyone but me. There were also others that I would place in the top five or ten that wouldn’t be my personal favorite but….

At which point someone else said, The Wizard of Oz and my husband interjected Day for Night..

As I then began sputtering out in no particular order All About Eve, The Way We Were, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Postcards from the Edge and Annie Hall (Note: The latter with the disclaimer that it used to be but now, well, it’s hard to watch, which led to a discussion of why, which I don’t want to get into for various reasons and is the subject of another blog).

I then quickly explained Hitchcock was one of my favorite filmmakers and that despite it not being his most artsy I just love Psycho.

As well as most every Almodóvar movie, and many of the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. But that I couldn’t leave out….Billy Wilder or Scorsese and that even though Gone With The Wind is so problematic from a contemporary lens I loved the book and the film as a teenager, which is ironic because of how pissed I was that BlacKkKlansman didn’t win the best picture Oscar that year over what I judged to be the far more retro Green Book and…

Well, you get it.

I’m a parlor game buzzkill because nothing is simple in my brain. But as a lifelong movie fan, there is especially nothing is simple for me about the movies.

So much to love for so many reasons.

And damn, what kind of gay man would I be if I didn’t include the restored Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born and Jacque Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg?

See, I can’t stop.

Which is sort of the point.

There is something about the movies.

Plays are great, books are wonderful when they are and nothing is better these days than a great season of a streaming show. (Note: Yes, Baby Reindeer and Hacks were fantastic but this year I was riveted to Carmy’s existential crisis all through season three of The Bear and couldn’t care less how many stars his fakakta restaurant got – that wasn’t the point!).

Don’t even get me started on the Tina episode!

Not to mention music, museums and one of a kind events like Luna, Luna.

But if you’re a pop culture freak of nature of a certain age like I am, films are… well… forever.

Something immersive that’s eternally branded in your mind.

Perhaps it’s because the second golden age of 1970s cinema was where I came of age.

Maybe it’s that movies run such a gamut, or require brain power from totally passive to you better f’n pay attention or you’ll miss something.

It could also be the special kind of escape they provide for a prolonged period of time without anyone else around – at home or in a darkened theatre – the latter being a place you can easily pretend no one else is around as long as no one’s brought their crying kid. #ChildlessCatPeoplePower.

Or thinks it’s their living room. #ShutTheFUp

In the more than a week since my niece asked her question I only today realized none of this matters because left to my own devices (Note: A dangerous place to be) films are my unwinding mechanism.

And there are not just one type nor do they have to be on my aforementioned “favorites”:

I happened to turn on TCM a few days ago and there were the beginning credits of Silkwood. A bunch of friends worked on it and I hadn’t seen it in years. But I doubted I’d re-watch a story of radiation, friendship and corporate corruption even with the help of Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep and Cher because it’d been a trying week. But it had me. And kept me. Not only did it hold up all these years but I found the sheer unabashed chauvinistic anger at the power of a strong woman like the late Karen Silkwood to be strangely energizing because of how absolutely infuriating and relevant it remains.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t equally into the new feature-length documentary on MAX entitled, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, a few days before. It’s an actual movie about THE biggest movie star of the 20^th century which she narrates via numerous reels of “lost “tapes she recorded in the mid-late sixties for a planned biography that never came to be.

She’s bawdy, funny, smart and clever but what she is more than anything else is honest. It’s a treat to hear the dish on the movies, the life, the triumphs and the tragedies from the source but it’s even better to see it unfold in the filmic images and real-life footage put together in motion picture form by a director as creative as Nanette Burstein.

I was busy this week but in the last couple of days the air sucked and my sinuses swelled so I chose to stay inside and read once I caught up on some politics (Note: Idiot). At which point, I changed channels and there was another really great contemporary film that should have won the Oscar for best picture – The Social Network. (The King’s Speech? Seriously????).

I know, who wants to see the Mark Zuckerberg story at this point, right? But I’d forgotten how much of an even-handed anti-hero Aaron Sorkin’s script made him and how well David Fincher’s frenetic filmmaking captured what, from our current rear view mirror, seems like a very strangely naïve era we couldn’t quite appreciate at the time. #MoviesCanDoThat.

Not knowing I’d be writing about movies but still staying hermetically sealed at home I continued, checking out the much maligned recent film The Bikeriders starring Austin Butler and Jodie Comer. Dismissed by many top critics and a few friends, it was bizarre, fascinating, funny and sort of touching. I’m not into 1960’s motorcycle culture and I never imagined an English actress like Comer could so convincingly pull off working class Chicago (Note: Though why not after what she did on “Killing Eve?”) yet it was fascinating. And Mr. Butler is just so much more enjoyable on a motorcycle than slithering his way through sand in Dune 2.

I guess now is the time where I admit that before I gave in and went outside on a walk/run this afternoon I spent two hours rewatching the critical and audience drubbed film version of Jersey Boys, directed by Clint Eastwood. Yeah, it’s sort of schmaltzy, a little cartoony and was definitely shot on the Warner Bros. backlot.

But jeez, it’s a movie fantasy musical melodrama. And the soooonnnggggs.

Sherry, Walk Like A Man, Big Girls Don’t Cry, Let’s Hang On, Working My Way Back to You… And the Italian guys from the neighborhood I grew up with that I seldom hung out with but loved from afar. Fuggedaboudit….

It was a time capsule back to an imagined version of the life of a real-life singer (Frankie Valli, of The Four Seasons) with movie mobsters, movie people and melodramatic movie heartbreak played against a purposely and infectiously nostalgic movie soundtrack.

It’s not Elizabeth Taylor, nor does it address corporate malfeasance, social media or the evolution of pop culture movements. We have those, as well as many other films, for that.

And for a lot more.

Jersey Boys – “Sherry” (at the White House)

05.26.24

by notesfromachair

It’s the Movies for Me

Sometimes I’m astounded at the impact movies have made on my life and the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent watching them.

This is particularly surprising to me because as I kid I watched a lot more TV than films and in my early teen years certainly spent more time obsessing about singer-songwriters and their relentless existential introspections. (Note: I came of age in the early seventies when this was all the rage).

Just me and Joni hanging in Topanga Canyon

Ditto Broadway musicals.

I am not going to once again write about my Dad telling me he would get us tickets to see anything I chose for my 11^th birthday as my first experience at the theatre (Note: A rarity since my family went practically nowhere as a group and my Dad and I had even less than that in common).

Or that somehow I chose Mame. Ahem.

I will only comment to future 11 year olds that my father likely knew me better than I thought. Or, at least was trying.

Yet somehow this all shifted as I became an adult. Sure, I remember having my life changed when I saw Mary Poppins as a kid on the big screen or how I looked forward to the then only once-a-year showing of The Wizard of Oz on TV (Note: Yeah, that was also a thing).

Or the time young teenage me found Lana Turner’s Madame X on NYC’s Million Dollar Movie (Note: Channel 9 or Channel 11, I can only recall they showed it all day and night) and I obsessively watched it four times in a row.

Ahem.

Times 12.

And let’s hear it for the sensitive, overly-theatrical lads.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

There was some moment where movies began speaking to me most personally. A time when the immersive experience of sitting alone in your thoughts at a movie theatre, yet surrounded by people who for me, most of the time, might not as well have been there but luckily were there, supplanted everything.

Part of it might have been the waiting in line (Note: I can still remember three plus hours in freezing cold Manhattan waiting for tickets to The Exorcist and bonding with a ton of waaay cooler people than myself also desperate to be scared “to death.”).

But more likely it was that films had a way of making everything bigger and more important than anything else in the world because they were literally HUGE.

So I learned pretty quickly that movies could address your fears, your hurts and your yearning for happiness, albeit in a somewhat ironic, funny yet loving way and SUPERSIZE your personal concerns in a way that you KNEW they deserved to be.

Films were way better than real life. They BECAME real life. Or real life experiences, at any rate. I often found that for those who didn’t understand me fully, I could simply recommend a film that dealt with my “issues” and refer it to them to watch if they wanted to know in a very real sense what truly concerned me.

It wasn’t the be all or end all. But at least it was a starting point.

I’d forgotten about this because in the last few decades movies, as a whole, have changed a lot. Oh, of course there are still great films, meaningful films, and every year there are more than a handful that speak to me personally.

But it wasn’t until my friend Ray Morton reached out to me via Facebook in a challenge where you have to publicly post ONE MOVIE IMAGE per day for 10 straight days with NO COMMENT (Note: The latter being the toughest part for moi), that I began to once again recognize the impact of the films I chose.

Maybe impact is not the correct word because it wasn’t so much that I was shaped by them. It was that I felt they represented me or that somehow they saw me or read my mind at a particular place in time. I didn’t plan ANY of my picks, I just posted what came to me that day. But as I peruse the list on this final day of the assignment I’m astounded by the personal resonance of the list.

It’s not that these are the best movies I’ve ever seen (Note: Though they are pretty great), that I couldn’t name ten more that were ever better, or more sophisticated, or more dramatic, or funnier, or more….more, more, more.

I could. And you could.

But I stand by my list because in a purely knee jerk, visceral sense they are there for a reason. They are, or were, ME.

The Way We Were finally made me realize it is not enough to love someone, or for them to love you, for a relationship to survive. (Note: And it only took me eight viewings over 20 years to get that).

Strangers On A Train showed me that I was not as crazy I thought and that if I thought my family was really crazy, well, think again.

Blue Velvet taught me you can write serious movies and be as sick and funny and twisted as you like as long as you’re committed to your world and your characters.

Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown made the newly humorless and bereft me laugh for the first time in a long time amid all the death and condemnation and destruction at the height of the AIDS crisis.

The Godfather provided the gold standard of storytelling for an aspiring storyteller and made me confident that my obsession with dysfunctional family dynamics had nothing to do with being Jewish and gay.

Brokeback Mountain allowed me to cry (A LOT) and appreciate what I had and was likely in peril of taking for granted.

BlacKkKlansman made me angrier than I’ve been since the eighties about how f-cked up the U.S is; showed the absolute default privilege you get (Note: I got) for being white; and reinforced my constant desire to waterboard (Note: But not kill, that would be too nice) every person supporting the orange sh-t stain.

Rosemary’s Baby brings back just how much I still love the visuals of the sixties and why, deep down, I was right to be suspicious of almost everybody.

Harold and Maude told me your teachers and lovers always appear when you least expect it and in the strangest of ways.

and

La La Land is an endless, dizzying, constantly morphing dream of too many things to count, many of which you are likely not to achieve in the way you thought, certainly not in Hollywood. But that there are far worse things than being a dreamer. And nothing better.

Cass Elliot – “Dream A Little Dream of Me”

notes from a chair

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It’s the Movies for Me