The 30 Day Cinephile Challenge: My Answers (Part 1)

On Facebook, there are multitudes of 30 day movie challenges (which consist of one probing movie question a day for...well, you know). I wanted to participate, but most of them bored me. It wasn't until I encountered the 30 Day Cinephile Challenge, with its vastly more inventive queries, that I opted to take part in one. My cohorts on this challenge, by the way, are extra worldly and so, by participating in this business, I'm learning much more about the global film scene than I ever expected. Anyway, just in case you're not one of my FB friends, and on the outside chance you perhaps wanted to know more about me, I thought I'd relay these questions and my answers to them here on filmicability. So here we go...

Day 1: My favorite opening scene
The Music Man (Morton DeCosta, 62). The original (white) rap, written by Meredith Willson and, amazingly, our hero Harold Hill doesn't even appear on-screen until the scene's tail end! An incredible rant about the values and pitfalls of the free market, and it still moves and rocks me years after I learned every line while listening to a homemade recording of the film on cassette tape. A powerful first scene.



Day 2: My favorite closing scene
The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 59). An escape to freedom, but with nowhere to go. It still gives me goosebumps!



Day 3: My most underrated filmmaker of all time
Peter Watkins. Every one of his films displays a fresh, chilling, immediately recognizable worldview, iced with an utter mastery of film craft. Even my least favorite film by him, Privilege, is something unique. But The Gladiators, Culloden, Edvard Munch, The War Game (for which he won an Best Documentary Oscar in 1965), La Commune (Paris 1871) and especially the radically scary Punishment Park are each uniformly magnificent, even if most people haven't seen them.



Day 4: Most overrated filmmaker of all time
James Cameron. Though I like The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss well enough (the director's cut of the latter is his best film), the heaps of praise, awards, and cash dumped on to this guy for his other travesties literally makes me sick to my stomach. Avatar was so bad that it made me question the sanity of a world that would flip its shit for it. Cameron is quite an inventor, though--he should just stick to that and leave the moviemaking to others.

Day 5: The best movie from my favorite filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Whether you think it boring or not, it's the greatest movie that has been made or will be made. It is completely successful in dramatizing the history of man from ape until superhuman. No other movie will ever even attempt to do such a thing without being compared to this progenitor. And no movie could ever do it, anyway.



Day 6: The biggest disappointment from one of my favorite filmmakers
Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002). I knew it was a project that he and Jay Cocks had been contemplating for over 20 years. When it arrived, with that awful U2 score over its opening scene, I was mortified. Daniel Day Lewis does his very best (and it is almost enough), but even he cannot save this misfire. The casting of DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz is laughable, and this faux-operatic movie just plods on and on. I'm sorry, but this much lauded battle sequence was ridiculously phony to me.



Day 7: A film I would love to share with everyone
A Little Romance (George Roy Hill, 79). The finest film ever made about the possession of a deep intelligence and the encountering of a soulmate. It never ceases to amaze me how deeply it affects me each time I watch it; I'm a weeping mess at its end. It says so much about me--as a romantically-minded film fan--and about humanity. But still it remains a minor cult movie at best. It should be required viewing in every film school class, I believe.



Day 8: My favorite experimental film
Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 63). Brakhage had no film stock available, but he didn't let that stop him. He took strips of 16mm editing tape and embedded in them pieces of moth wings and grass. I heard about this film in my 20s, but didn't get to see it until YouTube arrived. It was worth the wait. It's dazzling.



Day 9: My favorite North American filmmaker of all time (includes U.S.A. and Canada)
Barring the American Kubrick, who did his best work in Britain, I'll pick Orson Welles. No explanation necessary.

Day 10: My favorite Latin American filmmaker of all time
Mexico's Alfonso Cuarón. Like many others, I discovered him with the gorgeous A Little Princess. As a longtime love of the David Lean original, I avoided Great Expectations for a long time, but admired Cuarón's cheekiness greatly it when I finally saw it. Y Tu Mama Tambien is absolutely beyond reproach. He made the best Harry Potter series entry with The Prisoner of Azkaban. And Children of Men is a stone-cold masterpiece of the first order. I look forward to whatever he does in the future.

Day 11: My favorite African filmmaker of all time
Ousmane Sembene, from Senegal. Mandabi is a brilliant but sad comedy, Xala is vibrantly terrific, and Moolade is a complete shocker. I sure would like to see more films by him, but they're hard to find. And I'd like to see MORE African films, in general.

Day 12: My favorite Asian filmmaker of all time
Akira Kurosawa, of course. Why say anything else? Although I must say that Apitachapong Weerasethakul, from Thailand, is impressing me more and more these days.

Day 13: My favorite European filmmaker of all time
Ingmar Bergman, naturally. No one else even comes close.

Day 14: My favorite filmmaker of all time from Oceania
I could easily go with Peter Weir, and perhaps should, but few filmmakers make me more excited now than Andrew Dominick. With both Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he's a shining voice in 21st Century world cinema. With his next movie, due in 2012, being about Marilyn Monroe, it's clear he's fascinated with the trappings of fame, and how it affects the famous and everyone surrounding them. This is a perfect subject for our media-driven age, and thus makes Dominick a supremely relevant director.

Day 15: Two directors I would like to see working together on a film
Shane Meadows (Somers Town, This is England) and Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy). One is uniquely British, the other uniquely American, but both are similarly understated and humanistic in their approach to character-driven storytelling. I envision a film about two British brothers (12 and 14) being transplanted to New England, circa 1982.

Day 16: My favorite female filmmaker
Joan Micklin Silver, the vastly underrated director of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Between The Lines, Hester Street, Chilly Scenes of Winter, Crossing Delancey and Loverboy. No one writes better dialogue and has such a winning way with actors. And she really knows how to build a complex story without dropping the many pins she's juggling.

Day 17: My second favorite female filmmaker
Kelly Reichardt, director of River of Grass, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff. To me, she is now one of our primary filmmaking talents. She has a loving view of people with differing opinions on how their world is progressing, and what their place is in such a world, and I adore that about her. Plus, she has an unassailable vision of American life, and a smart cinematic prowess.



Day 18: My third favorite female filmmaker
I originally went with Lina Wertmuller, only for her exquisite, profound and hilarious Seven Beauties. But now I am rethinking this and am deciding upon Diane Kurys, whose three autobiographical movies Peppermint Soda, Entre Nous, and C'est La Vie, are remarkably frank chronicles of her rocky childhood as the daughter of divorced parents. I haven't seen any of her other works, but these three are enough for me, though I'd love to see more.

Day 19: My favorite British filmmaker
Leaving out Hitchcock, who did his best work in America, I have to go with Mike Leigh, whose detailed examinations of London life, across all strata of time and class, continue to astound me. None of his 19 feature-length films (many of them produced for UK television) are anything less than resolute genius, but I must confess a special love for Life is Sweet, Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, High Hopes, Naked, and Abigail's Party. Leigh is currently my favorite filmmaker working right now. I believe he can do no wrong. This is a devastating scene from his 2002 film All or Nothing, with Timothy Spall as a despondent husband and Leslie Manville as his in-denial wife. In its simplicity, it is a wrecking ball.



Day 20: Best quote from a filmmaker
"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible" -- Alfred Hitchcock

Day 21: An actor you love who became a filmmaker
I could easily go with Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Sidney Lumet, Robert Redford or Orson Welles. But I side with Bob Fosse, an actor/choreographer in Kiss Me Kate and Damn Yankees who's remarkable genius blossomed into a sadly short filmmaking career that gifted us with four unique, dark show-biz-related masterpieces: Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz and Star 80. Here he is, more than a decade before his 1969 directorial debut with Sweet Charity, doing the "Who's Got The Pain" number from Damn Yankees with his one-time wife and lifelong collaborator Gwen Verdon.



Day 22: A filmmaker who is also a good actor that you love
There is, of course, John Huston. And Francois Truffaut is superb in both Day for Night and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But I'm going with actor-turned-director-turned-actor-again Sydney Pollack, who impressed me in Tootsie, Eyes Wide Shut and especially in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. Here he directs himself, playing Michael Dorsey's humorously harried agent in 1982's Tootsie.



Day 23: A film, short or clip of your own making; if you don't have one, your favorite film or short clip from someone close to you
Here I am on an early episode of The Latest Show on Earth, with Joe Hendel, talking about the 2008 Oscars and some great midnight movies to rent. I've made films, but I'm not a filmmaker.



Day 24: A pretentious film
UK Filmmaker Peter Greenaway is unfailingly gassy, and I thought of including his stilted stink bomb Prospero's Books as my entry. But then I remembered one of his UK contemporaries, Derek Jarman, and his silly movie Blue, which consists of a blue screen for 90+ minutes, with a yawning audio background. It makes Andy Warhol's Empire look like Die Hard. This is where film experimentation goes too far, friends.



Day 25: An actor/actress whom you feel is wasting his/her talent on crappy films
Many people dismiss her talents, but let's not forget than Jennifer Aniston has been sublime in Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl, Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money, and Peyton Reed's The Break-Up. Somehow, despite her glamor, she's landed at the start of the 21st Century as American cinema's premier everywoman (though Kristen Wiig deserves a shot at that prize). But Aniston keeps taking below-par assignments in sad shit like The Bounty Hunter, The Switch, He's Just Not That Into You, Management, Just Go With It, and the terribly overrated Horrible Bosses (although at least with the last film she was trying something different). Her career desperately needs to meet another turn in the road.



Day 26: A lousy actor/actress who keeps appearing in good films
Every time I see Tom Sizemore, I wince. Such a small bag of tricks he has--he's always either a scummy cop, a scummy criminal or a steadfast but doomed soldier. Luckily, his stock has gone way down in the past decade, after appearing in such 1990s classics as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Heat, and Natural Born Killers. Still, when he pops up in movies like the Brian Cox starrer Red, I roll my eyes.

Day 27: A filmmaker you would like to work with
I wouldn't deign to work with any filmmaker I respected--I'm just not worthy. But I'd be content to be a mere fly on the wall on any set that Terrence Malick was in control of. I just wanna see what this guy is like.

Day 28: A film you wish you had made
Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. No other movie out there seems to be portraying ME quite as much as this film seems to be. While watching it, I felt like I had been spied on. It's the one and only time in which I felt the filmmaker was speaking DIRECTLY to me. It says so much about how I view the world, it makes me cry and, also, shudder.



Day 29: A filmmaker you would like to make love to
I'm speaking only from a purely physical standpoint here (although I think she's terrifically smart and talented): Kathryn Bigelow. ROWRR!

Day 30: A country from which you would like to see more films
Ingmar Bergman's movies made me fall in absolute love with the cadence and poetry of the Swedish language. But now that he's gone, we here in the USA can only hear the language in the films of Lukas Moodysson, reliably (Let the Right One In's Tomas Alfredson seems to have been seduced by Hollywood). I'd like to see more films from Sweden, thank you very much. This scene (not included in the theatrical version of the film) is from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander; please notice, primarily, the lilting beauty of the language itself.



The 30 Day Cinephile Challenge now extends to another month, effectively becoming a 60 Day Cinephile Challenge. I now embark on answering 30 more questions, much to my delight. I will post my answers to these as well and, when I am done with them, will try to provide a link for them here.

Forgotten Movie Songs #3: "Take Off With Us" from ALL THAT JAZZ

One of the biggest gob-smacking scenes from any movie I've even witnessed takes place at a crucial juncture for Joe Gideon (played by Roy Scheider). He's a director and choreographer, working at once on a new musical called NY/LA and a new movie about a troubled comedian, played here by Cliff Gorman. The musical he's toiling away at is a veiled version of the now world-famous Chicago, and Gorman was the actor who originally played the first notoriously blue-working comedian, Lenny Bruce, on Broadway in Julian Barry's Lenny. And both were directed in real life by Bob Fosse who, with longtime friend Robert Alan Aurthur, concocted one of the few director-driven film memoirs out there, called All That Jazz. Obviously inspired by Fellini's 8 1/2 (Fosse even stole Fellini's treasured collaborator, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, in order to shoot the film), All That Jazz is absolutely the greatest film autobiography available to us (only Fellini's admittedly fantastic originator and Woody Allen's similarly-inspired Stardust Memories approach this masterpiece, though neither own its unique force).

I have no idea who wrote the double entendre lyrics to "Take Off With Us"--I assume it was the libidinous Fosse himself--but I know that the music was composed and arranged by Ralph Burns, who'd won an Oscar previously for Fosse's Cabaret, and had worked on Fosse's debut film Sweet Charity, Woody Allen's Bananas, Mame, Lenny, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York, and Mel Brooks' High Anxiety before winning his second Oscar for All That Jazz. Somehow, this absolutely central song for one of the most acclaimed films of 1979 escaped an Oscar nomination. But that doesn't mean it wasn't good. In fact, it was the best song of the year, even though I absolutely love the eventual winner, "It Goes Like It Goes" (from Norma Rae, music by David Shire, lyrics by Norman Fox). To me, "Take Off With Us" was the musical event of 1979: it begins as a spoof of the old show-stoppers Fosse might have had to choreograph as part of The Pajama Game or Damn Yankees, but then it violently explodes those big marketing expectations by segueing into the darkly sexual "Airotica," which would have problems bringing in the family crowd on Broadway even these days. With "Take Off With Us," Fosse and Burns seduce us with show biz, and then smushes the sordidness of it all in our faces.

Here are only 18 carefully selected frame-grabs from this caffinated sequence, played in front of director Gideon (Schieder, doing a spot-on imitation of Fosse) and his producers (played scuzzily by William LeMassena, Robert Hitt, and David Margulies) and songwriter (the flaming Anthony Holland) The dancing team is spearheaded by the gorgeous Sandahl Bergman (whom most will probably remember as Red Sonja from the early 1980s Conan the Barbarian series); the dancing team features Fosse stage regulars Eileen Casey, Bruce Anthony Davis, Gary Flannery, Jennifer Nairn-Smith, Danny Ruvalo, Leland Schwantes, John Sowinski, Candace Tovar, and Rima Vetter (all of whom were acting under their own names). They are accompanied by the finest Broadway musicians available, set off to the side and beautifully photographed:

I think the reason this song wasn't nominated for an Oscar--even though Burns won for adapting and composing the score--was that the board was confused by its origin. It seemed like this song had been around forever. To add to the confusion, in the movie, the song didn't just end--it was augmented by the ominous "Air-otica" and, as it does with the guys playing the producers, it must have stunned the hell out of the Academy's song voters.

So here is Bob Fosse's crowning film sequence--the best thing he ever did, in my opinion--in its resplendent entirety, edited with utmost precision by Alan Heim (who won an Academy Award for this work). The song is presumably written by Bob Fosse (lyrics) and Ralph Burns (music):



Here are the song's lyrics (and I'm not including "Air-otica" in the mix); the backing vocals are in parentheses:

Take off with us! (Doo doo doo doo)
Take off with us! (Doo doo doo doo)
We're warming up, so (we're warming up) take off with us!

N.Y. to L.A., going all the way
Won't you climb aboard? You'll ride as smooth as glass (glass)!
Glass (...glass)

Meet our friendly, eager crew; they only live to service you!
[girls] (service, service, service, service)
[boys] (service you, service you)

(This flight) This flight comes complete, with your choice of seat.
And any seat you grab will be first class!

Up there where the clouds are pillowy,
You'll as-a close to heaven as you'll ever be.

Lean back, relax – here come the snacks!
Drop your diet have a ball – don't stop, don't stop, don't stop
with one – try ‘em all! (try ‘em all) [yeah, yeah, yeah]

Music's ready to begin;
Take out your headset – plug it in!

What's you're answer, chum?
Are you gonna come on the coolest, hottest
Coolest, hottest, coolest, hottest trip that's ever been?

(Don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha,
Don't you wanna go?
(Don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha, don'cha,
Don't you wanna go?

Fly, fly, fly, fly

Lean back, relax, uh!

SIDE ORDERS #8

For this edition of the video roundup I call SIDE ORDERS, I've again fallen back on my love for the marriage of movies and music:

The single best trailer this year was for Michael Haneke's stunning shot-by-shot remake of his 1990s classic Funny Games. This has the drive and flavor of a trailer for one of Kubrick's movies, right down to the choice of music, graphics, and shots. Alone, by itself, this trailer is a damn rocketship that DEMANDS you see Haneke's disturbing indictment of his own viewers as slavishly thirsty consumers of movie violence.


I loved Chicago when I first saw it in 2002, but subsequent viewings have left me sometimes resentful that director Rob Marshall cribbed so much glitter from the directorial stylings of Bob Fosse (who deserves an article all his own on filmicability soon). Fosse's sadly short film directorial career included only five films: 1969's Sweet Charity, 1972's Cabaret (1972 was the year Fosse became the only director in history to win the Oscar, the Tony and the Emmy in one year--a entertainment feat that the world will not ever see matched), 1974's Lenny, 1979's All That Jazz, and 1983's Star 80. On stage, he was behind the choreography and often the direction of such titles as The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Sweet Charity, Pippin (a version of this starring Ben Vereen, William Katt, Martha Raye and Chita Rivera is still available on DVD and is worth searching out), Dancin', Chicago, and Big Deal (I was lucky enough to see the latter on Broadway while Fosse was still alive--it was actually the first Broadway musical I ever saw, and I loved it, even if it wasn't critically embraced.)

Fosse himself should have directed Chicago on film, but fate had different plans--he died in 1987 at age 60. Still, if one were to look for the director nowadays who do the best Fosse imitation, one would have to stop at Marshall. Studied in every detail, Chicago is very much a Bob Fosse film that's been channeled through the adoring hands of a fan (Marshall even dedicated the film to Fosse and credited him with the choreography). The legendary director's presence can be sensed most egregiously in the nearly climactic number "They Both Reached For The Gun," which follows lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) as he manipulates both the statements of his murderous client Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) and the snarlings of the Windy City's rabid maddog press. Fittingly, this is all performed in an alternate dreamscape (common to Fosse's works) as if Hart is Flynn's ventriloquist dummy, and the press is loping about on marionette strings pulled by the flashy counselor. Coupling a chugging tune, quicksilver editing, note-perfect performances, and creepy Fosse-esque sets/makeup/costumes, "They Both Reached For The Gun" is a powerful defense for the film's eventual win as Best Picture of 2002, if only as a tribute to Fosse's singular genius.


When I first sat down to watch Lina Wertmuller's passionate WWII/Holocaust comedy Seven Beauties, I never expected to see an opening like this! It still stands as one of my twenty favorite beginnings to any film ever. Consisting almost wholly of vintage footage of wartime atrocities, it's punchily narrated (Oh yeah) by the film's lead, Giancarlo Giannini, and jazz scored by Enzo Jannacci. An angry yet amusing damnation of war and its mongers.


Usually, when songs come sweeping into animated movies, I feel them stopping the whole show cold. With notable exceptions like Snow White, Lady and the Tramp, and Beauty and the Beast, I've rarely felt as the addition of songs deepens the quality of animated films. Not so with Randy Newman's "When She Loved Me," the only number written for 1999's Toy Story 2. By the end of this heartrending segment (directed by John Lasseter and Ash Brannon), the viewer cannot help but be moved to their very core. In four minutes flat, the movie vividly reminds us of the adoration we all had for our favorite childhood toys, and the regret most of us have for treating them so poorly once we grew up; it also reminds us somehow of the people we've forgotten in our lives--the ones who once meant so much to us, but who are now nowhere to be found. As such, this scene is one of cinema's sublime contributions to humanity. Sung with typical emotion by Sarah MacLachlan, "When She Loved Me" has set up permanent shop in my soul. It'll always remain one of my favorite movie moments, and is definitely film history's premier match-up of songwriting and animation.


Finally, this little bit of film first appeared on TV as part of Sesame Street, which I watched without fail every day when I was a kid. Recently, one of my friends sent me a link to Lower Case n on YouTube, and I almost doubled over with a nostalgia stroke! This has to rank as the most haunting 1-minute-movie of all time. Written and recorded by Steve Zuckerman in 1970, it was submitted to the Children's Television Workshop from his San Fernando Valley studio, where he concocted the piece solo on a four-track recorder. This unprecedentedly melancholy cartoon (I wish I knew who animated it) is decorated with colorful flower-power-era images and an earwormy tune with evocative lyrics:

In an unknown and far-off place
There was a lower-case n.
Lonely and cold, she would stare off into space
And it was known that she would cry now and then.

Lower-case n
Standing on a hill
The wind is very still
For the lower-case eh-en...

Then one day a rocketship
Came racing from the sky.
It landed on the hill and it opened up a door
And somethin' started comin' outside...

It was a lower-case N!
(She's not lonely anymo-o-re)
Standing on the hill
(There are two that stand for su-u-ure)
The wind is very still
For the lower-case eh-ens!

Side Orders #3

Okay, this isn't really an opening to a movie I like, but it does feature a favorite opening song of mine---I mean, it rocks, and you can't get it out of your head!! A real earworm. Anyway, this is sort of a fan vid for a movie called The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid (El sheriff y el pequeño extraterrestre in Italian!). I have an interesting little story about this movie under my belt, but for right now, just enjoy the theme to this 1979 romp starring Italian superstar Bud Spencer as a Southern U.S. sheriff trying to protect a little E.T. tyke (played by former Close Encounters of the Third Kind kid Cary Guffey) from evil, black-suited U.S. forces. (Do you think it's possible Spielberg just saw this on TV one day and said "Heyyy, I think I can make something of this...")

Oh, boy, does this screenplay pop. Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich's fine blend of retro-comedy trappings with disarmingly modern touches, also has one of the best scripts around. It's written by Alvin Sargeant, who's also provided the screenplays for Julia (Fred Zinnemann, 77), Dominick and Eugene (Robert M. Young, 88), Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 80), and the last two Spiderman movies by Sam Raimi. This scene, adapted from Joe David Brown's novel Addie Pray, is one of his career best. In it, Tatum O'Neal plays the watchful Addie, a worldwise moppet who meets up with conman Ryan O'Neal at her mother's funeral ("Baby, I bet your ass is still warm," O'Neal whispers into her grave). He agrees to drive her to an aunt in Missouri, but not before deciding to make a little money off the girl. What follows is the explosive, rightfully famous "Nehi and Coney Island scene."


I always think the best trailers are the ones in which at least some of the footage is specifically shot for the advert. Case in point: many of the the opening shots of this preview for Bob Fosse's All That Jazz don't appear in the movie (though they were obviously part of the shoot for the short opening credits sequence). Definitely in hindsight, such a trailer makes the movie AND the preview more special, if not more symbiotic. The editing here is superb, and it's already a wonderfully edited (by Alan Heim) movie! My advice is to see All That Jazz, even if you think you won't like it. Believe me, it's a weird trip--very sobering, energetic, cynical, and stunning to look at. A life-changing movie for me.


It's rare a movie has a scene in it that sticks out so perfectly and unusually as does this one from Michael Mann's The Insider (1999). What's unusual about it? Well, it stands out largely on the backs of two actors who barely have another moment in the film. Here, Russell Crowe is Jeffery Wigant, a "big tobacco" scientist about to take the stand to say that cigarette companies knew nicotine was addictive. But Crowe is in the background only here as two character actors--Wings Hauser as the tobacco lawyer, and Bruce McCall as the Wigant lawyer--battle it out, with McCall making a VERY memorable one-scene impression in The Insider, a film that gets better and better each time I see it.