Something to Watch: Valentine’s Day
Apologies for the loss of comments, something kept eating the end of this post and it seems that deletion was the only solution.
It may be a desperate grab for cash, along the lines of a Father’s Day II or National Golf Acknowledgement Day, but anything that could possibly remind you to kiss your girlfriend’s toes one extra day of the year can’t be all THAT bad. After dinner and drinks, you may find yourself searching for that perfect flick to begin (or end) that dance that starts as the public portion of the evening reaches its end. With that, I offer five double features:
The Samuel L. Jackson as Ironic Instigator of Unexpected Romance Double Feature: Jackie Brown (1997) and Black Snake Moan (2007).
The very best romances are the romances that feel spontaneous, unreal, scary and vulnerable. The relationships shouldn’t feel like they’ve been worked out two months ahead of time by their star’s agents. Nothing, nothing, nothing is less romantic than numbing obligation. You will be able to sneak up on your young lady with either Jackie Brown or Black Snake Moan, because both, in the beginning, will feel like she’s doing you a favor. Both are riddled with profanity, both are steeped in sweaty, sleazy movie references that she (or you) probably haven’t heard of, and both feature Samuel L. Jackson at his crazy best as a very unexpected cupid.
Quentin Tarantino had written True Romance a few years before tackling Jackie Brown, but that earlier film is the fantasy of a very under-laid white guy who just wants “someone that understands him”. He actually understanding her is un-explored and, at best, optional. Jackie Brown was Tarantino’s follow-up to the monumentally successful Pulp Fiction, and one imagines that he was able to gorge himself on a variety of carnal delights while picking a follow-up picture.
As a result, Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, is mature and confident: Tarantino doesn’t feel the need to remind you that he’s cinema’s reigning bad boy in every frame. At about the forty-five, fifty minute mark, Robert Forster, in the best performance to ever grace a Tarantino film, spots the titular Jackie (Pam Grier) coming out of jail. She looks like shit (for the movies) but that doesn’t stop Forster from hearing a beautiful R&B song in his head as she approaches him. He’s instantly hers, but life, age and other things keep romance at a side-line. Instead, they decide to rip-off Samuel L. Jackson in his career best work.
If Jackie Brown features Jackson as the object of the couple’s wrath, then Black Snake Moan has a frazzled, vaguely Uncle Remusy Jackson inflicting his wrath on a mixed up couple that needs it more than they ever imagined: Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake. I never thought I would call a Ricci and Timberlake teaming romantic, but such is the charm and potential surprise of the movies. The film, a little like Punch-drunk Love, dives head first into the notion of people as mutual saviors from one another’s crippling rage and insecurity. Moan begins foul and self-conscious and ends in tender embrace. Few films can make a transition so believable, or heartbreaking.
The Paul Giamatti as Unlikely Romantic Hero Double Feature: American Splendor (2003) and Sideways (2004).
Again your young lady is going to initially feel as if she’s doing you a favor: men seem to get the appeal of Paul Giamatti much more than women. And I get it. Giamatti, at his best, is the spokesperson for everything a man can find about himself to dislike: he’s paunchy, short, stooped, bitter, making little money, and way too self-conscious to ever dream of landing a woman. But he does, and by the end, the women just may believe it too.
American Splendor isn’t exactly a romance, but the relationship between Giamatti and Hope Davis eventually comes to signify something very romantic: two flawed people who unite in mutual desperation discovering via their bitching that they’re perfect for one another. Watch how Davis handles Giamatti’s (playing Harvey Pekar) announcement that he has cancer. Watch how she holds him up, and forces him to face his art and his life.
Sideways, one of the most perfect American comedies to come down the line in some time, is more idealized. Giamatti offers a portrait of the self-loathing failure that’s, if possible, even less compromising (certainly less showy) than his Harvey Pekar, but the savior female embodied by Virginia Madsen here is a bit more on the fantasy side of things. She’s beautiful. She’s articulate. She’s undemanding, and, most importantly, she “sees something in him.” When the writing is this sharp, this lived-in, this poignant, this literate, you won’t much give a damn what’s real and what’s false. The final image is one of the most hopeful, satisfying, and earned in recent movies.
The Probably More Appropriate for Halloween but, Screw It, It’s My Web-Site Double Feature: The Fly (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001).
The Fly and Mulholland Dr. have more in common than you may initially realize. Both are my favorite of their acclaimed directors’ (David Lynch and David Cronenberg) work and both are, at their core, intensely moving stories of broken romance. The Fly is actually the more optimistic of the two, at least the lover in that one (Geena Davis) has reason to break the affair, her boyfriend (Jeff Goldblum) gets drunk and turns himself into a bug. Her devotion (again that word) is admirable though, as she’s the only one who has the stuff to do what must finally be done. Mulholland Dr., on the other hand, represents the other side of that coin: the lover splits as soon as things become somewhat inconvenient. Below a sometimes challenging narrative (though it’s not as bad as you’ve heard) lurks Lynch’s most naked, moving story of rejection and self-delusion.
The Unrequited, Self-Pitying Artist Love That Most Directly Taps Into Our Memories of Being Stood Up at the Junior High Dance Double Feature: Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Being John Malkovich (1999).
Edward Scissorhands ages poorly: the not really that funny John Waters satire slows the thing to a crawl, but there’s no denying the power of the opening and closing minutes, where an older Winona Ryder recalls to her grand-daughter the strange would-be lover that got away. That lover, an S&M cover of the creature that lived in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, remains in the tower Winona left him in so many years ago, creating snow storms just for her. We all like to think that we’ve inspired that kind of regret in someone who never saw anything in us (though we probably haven’t), so watch this movie and see what it could look like.
As trapped as Edward may feel at the end of his film, it’s nothing on what John Cusack (effectively playing against type) has to contend with at the end of the still fabulous Being John Malkovich. Cusack doesn’t just not get the girl. He doesn’t just lose his wife. He doesn’t even just lose his wife to the girl he also didn’t get. No, Cusack, in addition to those tropical storms of disappointment, is fated to witness their happiness for eternity in the mind of their love child. Total abject failure with someone you inappropriately love has rarely been rendered so vividly, or beautifully.
The This Behavior Would Strike Most As Sociopathic if This Wasn’t A Movie Double Feature: Say Anything (1989), Frankie and Johnny (1991).
Most women that I’ve spoken to love Say Anything, which represents the more popular incarnation of John Cusack, back before he started to play around with his “nice guy with just a bit of quirk so he’s not super boring” image. Guys like the movie too, and they tend to admire Cusack because he’s more approachably flakey than the leads in many romances, but can we acknowledge that the behavior that women applaud so in Say Anything is just a teensy-weensy deranged? Imagine, ladies, what you’d do if the man you lost your virginity to showed up one morning with the soundtrack to your lovemaking blaring over a boombox. Yet, in the movies, this is the height of selfless expression.
Actually it isn’t. The appeal of Say Anything lies in the notion of a total absence of mind games: Lloyd Dobbler is exactly who he claims to be and feels for Diane exactly how he claims to feel. Lloyd’s feelings are constant, un-changeable, reassuring, and totally absent in real life. Writer-director Cameron Crowe used to have a flair for selling this sort of thing, which has since, evidently, abandoned him. Crowe’s most recent picture, Elizabethtown, features a would-be lover (Kirsten Dunst) who’s one pretend camera click away from appearing opposite Bette Davis AS THE CRAZY ONE OF THE TWO.
Al Pacino’s short order cook Johnny is a little more relaxed by comparison, he waits about two hours into his first shift with waitress Frankie (Michelle Pfeiffer) before deciding to follow her around and declare their destiny to be united. The film seems to regard Frankie as a broken, up-tight shrew because she’s slow to warm to Johnny, but I found her behavior surprisingly relaxed and tolerant in that she manages to resist calling the cops. The film is an ode to stalking, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s directed by Garry Marshall, who’s managed to also transform kidnapping (Overboard), prostitution (Pretty Woman) and abandonment (Runaway Bride) into frothy romantic byplay. Common sense gets the better of those other pictures, but Pfeiffer and Pacino’s work in Frankie and Johnny trumps the cynic in me, and if it trumps the cynic in me, it will trump the cynic in you.
This last double feature, by the way, could also be called The Double Feature She’ll Most Actually Watch on Valentine’s Day and That Doesn’t Require A Bunch of Pretentious Cinephilic Justification.
Have fun kids.
February 14th, 2008 at 9:49 am
It’s ok, I didn’t say anything useful anyway.
This is still a great list though.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Awesome list. Jackie Brown never got its due credit in my book. Man, I love Sideways. At the present time that would be my pick for the double feature. Not too long, not too serious, just enough light-heartedness for the occasion.
February 19th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I told Robert Forster that the ending of JACKIE BROWN makes me cry every time. His daughter told me it makes her cry too.
I’m posting my recollections of QT 3, his third film festival, on my blog (pimp pimp), and it’ll include the best moment of the fest when Quentin talked at heartfelt length about JACKIE BROWN. You can see that he was hurt by the lack of appreciation, tho it did good box office. And it gave Forster a whole new career, for which Forster is eternally grateful.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Pimp away Christian, look forward to reading it. It may not come across here, but I absolutely adore JACKIE BROWN. It has gone from one of my favorite Tarantino movies to one of my favorites 1990s movies to just one of my favorites movies, something that I can enjoy and take comfort in at any time, but isn’t a guilty pleasure: it’s a great, passionate movie, and I meant what I said about Forster in terms of the Tarantino canon, and that’s no mean feat, QT’s films are rich with wonderful performances.
I look forward to Tarantino’s return to JB territory. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is brilliant, but KB 2 and Death Proof are disappointingly self-conscious, and maybe, if we want to over-analyze, it goes back to JB. His last two films demure and rely on wink wink trickery just when they should really commit.