Entries in the Category "drugstore cowboy"
Entertainment Weekly's 100 New Classics: Summed Up
I’m coming closer and closer to finishing up the AFI lists—with the most minimal effort it will happen this week—but before that happens I thought I would sum up the EW list with my two favorite things, opinions and statistics.
Here’s how I felt about the list:
Least enjoyed: Blue Velvet, Drugstore Cowboy, Evil Dead 2, Fatal Attraction, Natural Born Killers
Most enjoyed: A Room with a View, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Ed Wood, Glory, Hannah and Her Sisters, In the Mood for Love, Schindler’s List, The Incredibles, The Lives of Others
Most enjoyed (pre-list favorites): Back to the Future, Clueless, Donnie Brasco, Edward Scissorhands, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fargo, Ghostbusters, L.A. Confidential, Lost in Translation, Memento, Men in Black, Moulin Rouge, Office Space, Rushmore, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Naked Gun, The Silence of the Lambs, The Truman Show, Thelma and Louise, Witness
Additionally, I’ve been compiling a list of Notable Omissions--movies which were released between ’83 and ’07, and thus eligible for the list, but which are unaccountably absent. The list will appear in a future entry (or, if it keeps expanding, in two of them).
Here’s some stats that interested me:
The breakdown of the list by decade is 30 films from the 1980s, 45 from the 1990s and 25 from the 2000s. Even so, the majority of the films I watched were from the 1980s, which is easily enough explained: while my movie coverage has been adequate in the ‘90s and ‘00s, I’m still playing catch-up to movies that came out when I was a child.
The directors whose films I watched the most of were Steven Spielberg, Ang Lee, Alfonso Cuaron, Sam Raimi and James Cameron, at 2 films each. Cameron actually had 3 films on the list, but I had already seen Titanic (January 1997, the afternoon after I took my SATs, in case anyone cares). Other twice-appearing directors were Tim Burton, Rob Reiner, and Paul Thomas Anderson--each of whom had one movie I had seen previously and one movie which I watched this summer for the list--and Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir, Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers, each of whom had two films I had already seen.
One benefit of the EW list which I have mentioned previously is that its horizons extended beyond American-made movies. Another feature of the list, which I didn’t notice until I began compiling these stats yesterday, is that the EW list includes female directors--only five of them, but that still trounces either AFI list at zero and zero, respectively. Three of the female-helmed movies were massive hits: Shrek (co-directed by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson), Clueless (Amy Heckerling) and Big (Penny Marshall). I had seen all of those movies, multiple times on multiple occasions.
The other two were critical darlings, and represent the only two Oscar nominations for Best Director that have ever happened to women. Ever. [Edited to add: I have since checked IMDb and realized that I misread Jane Campion's biography. One other woman received a Best Director Oscar nomination, Lina Wertmuller in 1975. My indignance is, I think, still warranted.] Those movies are The Piano (Jane Campion, in 1994—this was a list movie) and Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, in 2004, already seen). Though neither woman won the directing award, both took home the same consolation prize: Best Original Screenplay. At this rate, another woman should be due to lose Best Director in another five years. That’s not a fault of the list, of course, but of Hollywood standards in general.
One final observation: the Entertainment Weekly list feels, in general, darker and more gothic than the AFI lists. It seems densely populated with drug movies, mob movies, serial killer movies, sci-fi creature-on-the-loose movies. I don’t think this is necessarily because those darker genres are being made more of today. Look again at my Ed Wood entry and all those movies Bela Lugosi made.
The difference is that genre movies are becoming increasingly more respected; probably Francis Ford Coppola started things off by making operatic mob movies (popular since the 1930s) which so effectively utilized the concept of the American dream that the Corleones became a part of our cultural fabric. These days, any serious director can make a critically-acclaimed crime movie (see last summer’s The Dark Knight, or, from two summers ago, Zodiac). On the flip side, so-called “feelgood” movies are losing respect. Too many brainless romantic comedies which force two patently unlikeable characters to kiss in the rain and get married as the end credits roll, too many of those disposable kids’ movies where the kid discovers his dog can fly and that helps him stand up against a bully, or whatever.
Basically, it’s hard to scrounge up the sincerity that elevates a movie like It’s a Wonderful Life above its Hallmark-y premise, and they just don’t do it that much anymore.
Movie Reviews: Drug Addicts and Their Inspiring Stories edition
The story of Sid Vicious, chronically unstable bassist for the Sex Pistols, and Nancy, his girlfriend and/or wife (the movie was contradictory about whether they were actually married). Nancy introduces Sid to hard drugs (if the movie can be believed) and they both gradually implode until Sid accidentally-on purpose kills Nancy. It’s all a disturbing, unbelievable-but-true story.
Of course, as the page I linked above will attest, no one knows what really happened, including Sid himself, who was too incapacitated to remember (or too guilty to admit). The movie has to make a choice about the events leading up to Nancy’s death, and it actually presents, I think, a plausible one. The movie represents Nancy as becoming increasingly suicidal as Sid’s career flounders, their money runs out, and their lives become unmanageable. She asks Sid on several occasions to kill her; on one fateful night, barely in control of his own faculties, he stabs her once, in the stomach. The situation rid of all tension, both of them relieved, they fall asleep on the bed together. And then she bleeds to death, because they are both too out of their minds to realize that a stab wound needs to be attended to.
Basically, the death reinforces the idea that Sid and Nancy’s relationship was violent but committed, that their love for each other destroyed them in a way that’s sort of ironically touching. They are portrayed as being kind of a nicely-matched pair, honestly. There’s one scene where they’re holed up in his mom’s house and they’re talking about cartoons or something, the cartoons they watched when they were children, and they are flipping out laughing, and seem utterly in sync. In fact, I wish a few more movie romances would show a scene where the characters are joking and bantering, chattering about nothing, and not in that stupid, fake When Harry Met Sally way, in the way that couples actually do it.
Gary Oldman gives an incredible performance as Sid, the music is great, the London and New York locations are very cool. I liked it, but it should go without saying that those with weak stomachs or no appreciation for irony need not apply. Maybe I sugar-coated it in my own mind, because I will admit to flashing constantly back to the episode of The Simpsons which spoofs this movie, where Lisa plays Nancy to Nelson’s Sid and they derail his career with their addiction to candy.
First of all, this is officially the most drug-less drug movie I have ever seen.
The movie’s about a quartet of drug addicts who engage in highly choreographed heists of pharmacies and drugstores and hospitals. They are the Ocean’s 11 of junkies. What I want to know is, why are they so much more interested in robbing drugstores and pharmacies and hospitals than they are in taking the drugs? They get a huge haul and they can’t stop talking about their next theft long enough to actually smoke or inject (or whatever) what they’ve got. Compared to Sid and Nancy--compared to certain characters from behind-the-scenes-of-the-meth-industry opus Breaking Bad--God, it seemed like these characters were never actually stoned.
And then when Matt Dillon decides to go clean, all we see is a lot of shots of him looking out the damn window! I didn’t realize narcotics withdrawal was so pensive, so tedious. The guy got a job operating a drill press, for crying out loud. Pretty steady hand for a recovering junkie. The movie became quite philosophical at that point, too, in the most navel-gazing, junior high way possible. This life, this life; it’s all so meaningless. Life as a law-abiding citizen is such a soul-crushing bore and drugs are the only way to experience love or passion; what a painful choice.
Dumb.
The Champagne is on Ice
Last night, Jeremy and I watched Unforgiven, a Clint Eastwood-directed, Oscar-winning flick about amorality in the Old West. This movie, from 1992, is one of just a handful of films that landed on all three of the top 100 lists that I’ve been working through this summer.
The big news is that it also represented the last of one of those lists for me. As of last night, the Entertainment Weekly list has been completely exhausted!
So, the champagne is on ice, so to speak, but it’s not ready to drink yet. One list is down, but 17 movies remain. Still, with Natural Born Killers and Drugstore Cowboy out of the way, I feel safe in assuming that the worst is behind me.
I have a viewing schedule all set, which, including my two remaining Epic Wednesdays, will finish me on all lists completely by Wednesday, August 5.
Epic Wednesday: Ghetto Life
Today's viewing schedule:
9:30 Menace II Society
12:00 Do the Right Thing
3:00 Hoop Dreams
I have six movies left on the EW list, these three and three others. All six are on my shelves right now, and so I could conceivably finish the EW list in as much time as it takes me to watch those movies.
Unfortunately, two of the other three that remain are Natural Born Killers and Drugstore Cowboy, which both look terrible. The last is Unforgiven, which I would quite like to watch, but which I'm saving to for Friday night to watch with Jeremy.