I love them.
I really do.
I think they are a mirror into the soul, a moment that someone who is not really a talker, can be given an opportunity to just be honest. Every single answer deserves something longer, something thicker, but if you want a two word answer, that, too, can be put into play.
Like this one!
A dear friend, recently under a smattering of stressors posited a decent question of one these questionnaires and I had begun to answer it. But then my impulse led to deep thought and I started looping and looping. The question got bigger and bigger and...
...now we're blogging.
The question:
"What are five movies, and only five, that a person born after 2000 BCE should see?"
No more or further elaboration.
You're asking a cineast to decide this? Okay, okay, okay.
It's been a week.
I elected to, in my own brain's way, put up some barriers to help me decide on what five films would teach a youth about the decades before they existed. I know, and I hope those millennials would too, that movies are fiction and are hyper reality of a time. Idealism abounds. The 50s had a shitload of crime, but most of the time, it was swept under the rug and pop music and drive in movies abounded. The 60s were a time of youthful upheaval, but not everyone was doing the amount of drugs that film portrays.
Now, to further my boundaries, I elected to give fair shake to each decade. Not necessarily a movie FROM that decade, but that might illustrate a time gone by.
I'm reminded of watching the famed horror flick, "Cujo" recently. The entire movie would have been over in about 5 minutes if Dee Wallace Stone had a cell phone with a decent charge going. But the movie takes place in the 80s. An entire decade stuck in cars while there were beasts circling. A moment in time that no one realized.
So? I found five.
Hairspray (the musical version) a movie that hits the highlights of a decade with a light touch but much deeper themes. I had imagined "Grease" might also work, but the more I thought about the time period they were representing, and the 50s up there was a bit too lily white. There was some deep, deep issues going on 50s, but white priveldge didn't let the world know. Integration was underway in many American cities and the stress was visible-but popular culture, run by the Caucasian exes in entertainment, used media to lock in their views. This musical is a great way to see that strange, weird time and how it brought about change by merely existing-everything was going to explode eventually.
Plus, believe it or not, it's a great musical. Fuck. I mean it had Jon Travolta in drag.
The Graduate-to represent the 60s, I thought about mentioning M.A.S.H., an incredible film about the stupidity of war, just like Catch 22. However, M.A.S.H., bolstered by superior performers on television, was much better there. And Catch 22 was incredible filmmaking about the same issues, to some extent, but the book ruled.
There's something thematic about the movie that truly encapsulates the angst of youth in a scant two hours. You have the youth, just graduated and without purpose. Doing what the generation did prior and realizing, quickly, the previous generation is clueless to the realities of the 60's. The youth played brilliantly by a very young Dustin Hoffman, slowly finds that money is not the goal in life, love. Only that is a perilous path, as he begins a brief affair with his neighbor's wife-and sees, also, how barren and cold the generation before him is. It's an amazing picture. There's a brevity to it, an approach which widens the title to a much larger audience, but the undercurrents that young people that very day were experiencing where right there, too.
Taxi Driver-Take what you had in the 60s and let it run loose. Let the promisciousness that was suggested, a rising drug culture, and a profound sense of angst that was never resolved with the free-wheeling 60s and you arrive at Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese had not defined his style yet, but it's still there, leaking onto the screen. A listless taxi drive, unable to cope with the depravity of the world around him revolts, violently. With the incredible talents of Robert DeNiro, the movie is stark and dreary, but the feelings are true. He was told, if he did right, worked hard, that society would pay him back with money and life.
Obviously, the dream was broken.
The piece becomes even more profound with the case of America at this very moment. Where people in one particular party still seems to believe that if you work hard, you can rise above poverty and glut. Alas, that is not the case. And, in America, where guns are so much around, the response, encouraged by the politicians, is violence. And Travis Bickle, the driver, does exactly that.
It's not pretty. But it is a fascinating study. A moment in time, captured like lightening in a bottle.
Do the Right Thing When AFI started releasing their self-aggrandizing lists of this famous part of the movie or that, their very first list was about the best American movies, ever.
It was a disgrace. Like so many Oscars over the years, it was so white, sheet ghosts would cover their eyes. Alas, the movies they did pick were very, very good, defining the world of cinema, but it also painted a picture that was not totally representative of the audiences that went to these movies. Every white male protagonists jumped onto that screen. Even the one ethnically diverse title, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" A film about interracial marriage, was focused on it's white stars.
A great movie.
But this movie was left off the list. With Do the Right Thing, a young college filmmaker, Spike Lee, brought the world with him to see the world though his eyes. In the film, a young black New Yorker, on the hottest day of the year, notices that the local pizza joint doesn't have a single black person on the wall, only Italian Americans. As the day progresses, a series of events escalates racial tensions and this becomes the target for a horrible surge of violence.
In the middle of it, was the simpliest solutions. All he had to do is hang a small picture and say, "honorary Italian." And he could have gathered the respect of the community he was catering too.
Alas, this 80s movie showed something daring and different. The voice of a minority filmmaker. The ongoing tensions over race that, actually, can be quite simply overcome by just recognizing each other as whole people. There's a brisk pace to the title, carrying it beyond it's serious subject, and I find that it really does capture those late 80s. That there was a problem, a lack of respect going on with several fronts.
An issue that could be so solved if we all just made an effort to get along.
Fight Club: I love my stuff. And, through reading and meditation, I'm learning to keep my loves focused. TO not want money or the big items, but know that my husOtter and corgis are all worth the effort. Make just enough to put decent food on the table, but nothing beyond that.
But, during the 90s? Well, let me put it to you this way-how do you get a democrat elected for a second term? You make sure that everyone is getting money. Watch soulless Republican bigots suddenly vote when their coffers are full! The Religious Right even turned a cheek when Clinton was found having relations with his employees, cause, well, they could keep their Lexus.
That was was the 90s. Nothing so two faced as it was. All the assholes were suddenly playing nice to the nice and back and forth.
And this movie mimicked it with abandon. Here was the very nice, unnamed, Narrator, who seeks solace and cannot, for the life of him, figure out why he is so unhappy with all the wonderful things around him. He joins support group after support group in a grimly, darkly comedic romp and finds a woman with something similar. And, on a particularly fateful flight, he bumps into the ruggedly handsome soap salesman, Tyler Durden.
They fight. Physically and repeatedly. People watch and start their own fight clubs, where they just-fight. And through that, experience a kind of catharsis. These groups come to realize that, given nothing by society, their rage cannot be contained.
There's a delicious twist to all of this, but you'd have to just watch.
Now there's more I'd love to elaborate on, here, but the fact is, they asked for five. These are they. The 00's aren't represented, but shouldn't be, really. Understand, too, these are not my favorite movies, just the ones that captured their decade in a very specific moment.
