Road Movies

It's a human trait to want to pick up and start over somewhere else.  Or wander aimlessly without having to commit to a place (or anything for that matter) for very long.  One of my favorite of all types of films is the "road movie", as these feelings of freedom and adventure are at these films' very core.

In the mood for a little wandering, here are a few of my favorite road movies:

Stranger Than Paradise.  Jim Jarmusch.  1984.
Alice in the Cities.  Wim Wenders.  1974.
The Passenger.  Michelangelo Antonioni.  1975.
Kings of the Road.  Wim Wenders.  1976.
In the White City.  Alain Tanner.  1983.

1984: Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax)

1984: Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax)
The two toughest years for me to choose in this countdown were 1984 and 1986.  I simply have too many films from each year that I absolutely love.  And although I can't argue that the Carax film is better than the entries from Rohmer, Leone, Wenders, or Jarmusch, it's the film that's had the most profound effect on me. 

Born Alexander Oscar Dupont, Leos Carax is an anagram of his first and middle names.  Remove the first two letters, and you see Oscar. Take the first two letters of the first name and the last two letters of the last name, unscramble them, and you have Alex.  The import of all this, not much, other than there's a playfulness to Carax's name that carries through to his work.      

Carax was only 23 when he made Boy Meets Girl, and it shows.  It's the kind of film that makes us realize how seldom the cinema gives us the opportunity to experience the world of this young of a man.  It's simply too difficult to make films and so it usually takes someone a good bit older to get a feature on screen.  Already with the proliferation of digital tools, we're seeing this change a little.  Carax's vulnerability makes us want to see more of it.  

In my post on Pierrot le fou (Godard is clearly Carax's greatest influence), I mentioned that it was one of the most personal films I had ever seen.  Carax takes it to another level in his debut.  There's a deep nakedness to the way that Carax uses voiceover, and there's never any doubt that the film is anything more than a thinly disguised tale of Carax's world, thoughts, angst, romantic longings and frustrations.  

But Carax's film is not just a narcissistic exercise.  He proves here that he was on his way to becoming one of the most formally dazzling filmmakers in the world.  Just look at the beauty, the lyricism, the expressiveness of the way he uses sound and image.  The difficulties of The Lovers on the Bridge scarred him in a way where he might never recover, and the death of his extraordinary cameraman, Jean-Yves Escoffier, certainly hasn't helped him.

Carax's impact?  Live your passion like he does here.  Be bold, be honest, be playful.  If I were a cinephile in 1984 and saw this film, I would have said that the French New Wave is alive and well and just spawned its next great filmmaker.  I miss Leos Carax and sure hope we'll get at least one more great confession from him before it's all said and done.  If not, at least I have Boy Meets Girl.

Other contenders for 1984: I still have some things to see from this year.  They include: John Cassavetes' Love Streams, Juzo Itami's The Funeral, Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift, Alan Rudolph's Choose Me, Pedro Almodovar's What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields, Michael Radford's 1984, and John Huston's Under the Volcano.  I need to revisit Martin Brest's Beverly Hills Cop and Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story as it's been too long since I've seen either of them to know where they'd place on this list.  From this year, I really like Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose.  I love Eric Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris, Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in America, Brian De Palma's Body Double, and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas.  And my closest runner-up is Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise.

3/25/12 I watched Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk.  Milk's story is a great one, and I loved getting this other perspective, after seeing the Van Sant narrative portrait of his life.  Perhaps a few too many interviews keep it from being a truly great doc but a very enjoyable watch all the same.  

8/21/16 I watched Alex Cox's Repo Man.  It is the first time I have seen this highly talked about cult film.  The atmosphere is so odd and if I can commend Cox for anything it is for sustaining this tone and off-kilter feeling throughout.  But it is all quite cold and I found it very difficult to connect to any of the characters or the proceedings.  
4/1/17 I watched Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap.  Actually the first time I've ever seen in its entirety.  It's not really my type of thing but it is clever and Guest and McKean deliver.

5/26/18 I watched John Cassavetes' Love Streams.  I'll go ahead and say it, Cassavetes continues to be a tough filmmaker for me.  He may be edgy and honest but I also find his films, for the most part, a trudge, depraved and dank like being in a windowless bar that I really don't care to hang out in for very long.  The editing is interesting as are some of the free-flowing dream sequences but I never fully connected and remain on the sidelines with the majority of Cassavetes' works.

7/1/18 I watched Alan Rudolph's Choose Me.  Reminiscent somewhat of Coppola's One from the Heart, Scorsese's New York, New York or even Walsh's The Man I Love, it is unique and admirably consistent in its stylistic approach.  Unfortunately, that approach is about pushing the artificial nature of things - locations, emotions, non-diegetic music - in a way that has never been a real interest of mine.  

11/23/18 I watched Frederick Wiseman's The Store.  It is another pure look at a subject by Wiseman, even if it does not reach the heights of some of his best work.   

11/24/21 I watched Raoul Ruiz's Manuel on the Island of Wonders.  One of Rosenbaum's top 100 is a film that displays Ruiz's talent for capturing the world through the eyes of a child.  It shows the world in its many possibilities, its beauty and its fears.  Interpretation is a challenge but it is a film I plan to revisit again to approach it with greater clarity.

12/28/21 I watched Blake Edwards' Micki & Maude.  Even if Edwards' energy is a bit broader and manic for my tastes, he does an excellent job keeping this mad romp entertaining.

1/2/22 I watched Abbas Kiarostami's First Graders.  Has there ever been a filmmaker with more skill for directing young boys?  It is unlikely given the amount of experience Kiarostami gained through all of his narrative and documentary work with the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults.  A longer work with a few sublime moments such as the father picking his first grader who has polio up from school.    

1/29/22 I watched Joe Dante's Gremlins.  It's fun and has some interesting things to say about America's immaturity and recklessness as a world superpower.  But the subtext is also more fun to think about or follow than the story itself.

2/15/22 I watched Jerzy Skolimowski's Success Is the Best Revenge.  It's the fourth of Skolimowski's films I have seen in the last year and the one that involved me the least.  As usual, his ability to use the camera in a way that illustrates the power of cinematic movement and space is masterful but the storytelling is so dissonant and disjointed that I became frustrated rather than taken in.  

2/27/22 I watched Andrew Horn's Doomed Love.  An incredibly unique American independent film that, simply watching it, seems to have had a massive influence on Hal Hartley and his hyper-mannered style.  I cannot recall a filmmaker achieving a more consistent lyrical quality in his or her work using less means than Horn employs here - painted sets, painted props, a handful of actors and not a single shot of the outside world.  

11/17/22 I watched Atom Egoyan's Next of Kin.  I love seeing first features of filmmakers I would go on to like and admire.  Egoyan proves himself adept at personal, unique filmmaking - strong with his actors and gifted in placing the viewer in situations of sustained discomfort.  Perhaps not fully formed or felt but I'm glad to see where Egoyan started.

1/7/23 I watched Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense.  One of these films I thought I had seen until I watched it again.  The real star is Byrne who you can't take your eyes off of.  And if the measure of a good concert film, and I haven't seen many concert films in general, is if it entertains you while giving you a better sense of what the band looks and feels like then Stop Making Sense is hugely successful. 

Favorites of My Favorites #9 -- Jim Jarmusch

My dad has been known to say, “There are really only two different types of people:  complicators and simplifiers.”  By his statement, I’m sure you can guess which of the two groups he’s in.

In filmmaking, it’s fairly easy to be a complicator.  The emotions emanating from the actors in a scene aren’t quite working, add music.  The film’s moving a little slow, add some fancy camera move or editing trick.  Not every single person watching your movie takes away the same thing, add another scene so there’s no longer anything left unsaid.   

Simplying in film is much like deconstructing, keep taking away elements until you’re left with just the bare essentials.  I would say that most filmmakers are complicators, even some of the guys I really love (Wong Kar-Wai, Godard, Leos Carax, and De Palma, to name but a few.)  But, there’s also a small group of simplifiers.  In this group, I would place, among others, Dreyer, Ozu, Bresson, some Dardenne brothers, and Jim Jarmusch. 

I like almost everything about Jarmusch.  To me, he’s the Thelonious Monk of filmmaking.  His rhythms are very unique, but off and angular like Monk’s piano playing.  Along with David Gordon Green and Terrence Malick, he’s as close to a poet as anyone we’ve ever had in American film.  He’s finely attuned to the way that words sound and cuts them and his images in a way that’s less prose-like than it is abstract and atonal.

His work with all his cameramen is staggering.  But, I have to single out his collaboration with Robby Muller (particularly Dead Man and Down by Law) as one of my favorite in the history of the medium.  Muller also did incredible work with Wim Wenders (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities, and Paris, Texas.)

I love his musician collaborations, too.  I think with these unconventional composers (John Lurie, Tom Waits, Neil Young, RZA, and Boris), he’s been able to accomplish some of the most interesting scores of the last twenty-five years.

Jarmusch takes his time, both with the pacing of his films and, it seems, the pace of his filmmaking.  Since he emerged in 1980, he’s only made ten features and one documentary.  As I look around and see my life and our movies seemingly getting louder and faster every year, I take great comfort in knowing that Jarmusch is out there, Zen-like, trying to do it all in a very simple way.

JIM JARMUSCH (in preferential order)

1.  Stranger Than Paradise

2.  Dead Man

3.  Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

4.  Down By Law

5.  Mystery Train

6.  Permanent Vacation

7.  Night on Earth

8.  Broken Flowers

9.  The Limits of Control

10.  Coffee and Cigarettes

Never seen:
Year of the Horse

Sherman's March

This weekend I caught up with this 157 minute documentary.  Like Killer of Sheep and Stranger Than Paradise (and many others, of course), Sherman's March is a key work in the history of American independent filmmaking.  But somehow it's just now come to my attention.

Ross McElwee's film is absolutely not for everyone.  It's lo-fi, quirky, slow, long, and even a bit austere in its approach.  But it's also very personal, without ever really being abrasive or intimate, in an overly exposed way.

I'm always looking and thinking about ways to make my own work more personal without making it self-absorbed.  It's a tough balance to strike.  And whenever I find a filmmaker who can consistently entertain me while talking about themselves, I usually embrace their work (Woody Allen, for instance).  Obviously, it's easier when the filmmaker has a comic streak; it just lightens the whole venture.

One of my favorite contemporary filmmakers is Andrew Bujalski, and particularly his film Funny Ha Ha.  If you like that film, I highly recommend this documentary.  Bujalski, like McElwee, really lets you in on his awkwardness, insecurities, anxieties, but he does it with real nuance, grace, and of course, occasional humor.   Some would call both of these films mumblecore, I would simply call them very fine works by very patient and bold filmmakers.