Doc Nebula, who appears to be the sole contributor over at The Miserable Annals of the Earth, brings up an intriguing question:
It's odd. Something has changed in how films are made these days. Back in the 80s, when I was in college, I had many favorite directors, and I based my moviegoing choices around them. None of them were completely reliable (in fact, looking back on it, pretty much every director I ever would have listed as a favorite at that time -- Hill, Spielberg, Scorcese, Romero, Myers, Gilliam, Kasdan, Cameron, Howard, Levinson, McTiernan -- ended up producing more movies I disliked than liked; Hill, in fact, has only directed five films I really enjoy out of 25... and most of the others have similar track records).
And yet, nowadays it seems like I have no favorite directors, and while I will weigh directors when deciding what movies to see, it's no longer anything like the decisive factor it once was. Curtis Hansen directed one good movie right in the middle of an ocean of crap, but it was SUCH a good movie... I like Chris Nolan's work, but what the fuck was that INSOMNIA nonsense? Bryan Singer did USUAL SUSPECTS, sure, and the first two X-MEN movies were swell, but I still can't pry SUPERMAN RETURNS off my nutsack. Peter Jackson? Jesus Christ, even if I didn't keep a cheap videotape copy of THE FRIGHTENERS around as a reliable insomnia cure, I need only remember how mind bogglingly awful the last two LOTR installments were to get me past that. Barry Sonnenfeld? Lick me, WILD WILD WEST boy.
Interesting conundrum. I can't really get behind any of the directors Doc listed in the first paragraph, and some - like Kasdan (The Big Chill) and Howard (The Da Vinci Code, How the Grinch Stole Christmas) - never did it for me to begin with. But I see his point. Scorsese used to be nails, and McTiernan from 1987-1990 couldn't be topped, but everyone else is so damned uneven these days.
I'm not as down on Hanson, but then I liked Wonder Boys as well as L.A. Confidential. And the juvenile me used to love all things John Carpenter. Sadly, I'm pretty sure the scales fell from my eyes some time around Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Same with pre-Spider-Man 3 Sam Raimi.
There are others that the jury's still out on. Among these are Stephen Syriana Gaghan, Ben Affleck (don't laugh; Gone Baby Gone was really good), and Sarah Polley.
Of the current directors that spring immediately to mind, I'd have to say Neil Marshall - as I'm a huge fan of both Dog Soldiers and The Descent (I'll reserve judgment on Doomsday) - Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Supremacy), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Millions), Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille), David Fincher (minus Panic Room), and Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth).
So go ahead and tell me who I forgot.
Here’s the four where I await new movies with anticipation: Everything Paul Thomas Anderson has made is top-notch. Wes Anderson may be a one-trick pony, but I love his movies. The Coen brothers make great films, and certainly have a broad range. Errol Morris makes smart, artistic, and engaging documentaries.
Honorable mention to Robert Rodriguez, Terry Gilliam, and Tim Burton; they all lack consistency. Pedro Almodovar doesn’t suck. And in case no one mentions it, fuck Quentin Tarantino.
Wow, headliner status at APCB. If I’d known, I’d have brought my top hat and cane. ;)
I am, in fact, pretty much the owner/operator over at Miserable Annals of the Earth. The other contributors listed comprise, very nearly, the entire readership. They show up as ‘contributors’ because, for a while there in 2006, I had one particular blog-stalker who was extremely unpleasant and, at times, outright threatening, and my wife (who is perhaps my most avid reader) was getting very upset reading his/her bilious crap in the comment threads. So I closed the threads to anyone who wasn’t an official ‘member of the blog’, and only let people I knew join. Which is why you see the ‘contributors’ list on my sidebar.
Nowadays, I just monitor ALL comments. It probably inhibits idle, casual scroll-by readers/wannabe commenters quite a bit, but that particular stalker I mentioned is still lurking out there (according to my stat counter, anyway) and, well, if you want to see the other kinda crap I deal with, Google ‘Doc Nebula’ and ‘Portal of Evil’ sometime.
But, basically, it’s a one-footed blog, and that foot is me.
I long since realized that you and I disagree as much as we agree in the wonderful world of cinema — we’re of one mind on the ongoing debacle that STAR WARS has become, but, on the other hand, I loved me some Lawrence Kasdan starting with his co-writer’s credit on EMPIRE, then moving to BODY HEAT, and all the way up to THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, where I got off that train with some alacrity (although I believe I returned to it briefly for GRAND CANYON, which was somewhat misshapen, but still fairly enjoyable, whenever Mary Louise Parker wasn’t snarling, spitting, whining, pissing, moaning, and rolling her eyes all over the screen).
Ron Howard also was a very reliable director (at least, for me) up through PARENTHOOD. Um… well, okay, he wasn’t, really; I loved SPLASH, liked COCOON fine, liked GUNG HO a bit less (never been the world’s biggest Michael Keaton fan), nearly put a gun in my mouth halfway through WILLOW, then came back for PARENTHOOD, which I mostly enjoyed. But Howard pushed me away with BACKDRAFT, a movie that had no idea what it wanted to do or be and that managed to utterly waste Donald Sutherland, Robert DeNiro, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, shoved me off a cliff with FAR AND AWAY, kinda-sorta threw me a half assed hank of knitting yarn for a lifeline with THE PAPER, got me all the way back with APOLLO 13… and then squandered it all with every movie he’s made since, especially the horror men call A BEAUTIFUL MIND. (The First Movie Where Jennifer Connolly Keeps All Of Her Clothes On, While Russell Crowe Loses His Mind. If only they’d used that tagline I could have saved seven bucks at the box office.)
But, see, this is the thing. I take a good hard look at the output of even my ‘favorite’ directors from back when I had ‘favorite’ directors and I find a lot of really bad crap in there… even when I liked them they were throwing out the occasional stinkers. Take Scorcese, for example. Emotionally, I still feel like I want to adore him without let or hindrance, and why? It’s the Zelazney effect. I love LAST WALTZ, KING OF COMEDY, COLOR OF MONEY, LAST TEMPTATION, and, always and especially, GOODFELLAS, so much and so intensely that I rarely allow myself to be conscious of all the other stuff he made, before and interspersed with those movies, that I didn’t like at all. And since GOODFELLAS, it’s like he keeps getting handed the keys to ‘59 Cadillac El Dorados, at which point, he smashes in the back window, pours in gasoline, and sets them on fire, like Christopher Serrone or something. Even THE DEPARTED wasn’t good Scorcese, it was only a good movie by the utterly debased standards that movies have fallen to over the course of the 90s and the Oughts.
I also forgot to mention John Sayles, although, in all honesty, my listing him as a favorite director was really only based on a handful of movies — BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, LONE STAR, CITY OF HOPE, and, especially, EIGHT MEN OUT, the finest sports film ever made. But that’s the same phenomenon as all the others… a few good movies far outshine all the crap I couldn’t stand and, generally, don’t remember.
I didn’t like WONDER BOYS at all, but am a huge L.A. CONFIDENTIAL fan. Having said that, I believe that movie ends five or six minutes before the actual ending; credits should have rolled immediately following the moment when Eckley ‘holds up his badge to show he’s a cop’, as the black and whites are rolling up the hill towards the Victory Motel, seconds after he’s ‘shot a suspect he knows is guilty in the back, to prevent him being acquitted at trial’. At that point, the movie is over and every character has completed their necessary arc — Lynn has advised Eckley that she’s ‘all right’, neatly taking her off the stage, Dudley, Bud, and Hollywood Jack have all paid for their murderous sins with their lives (some of them we’ll mourn more than others, but in a true morality tale, there can be no redemption for any of them short of the grave), while Eckley, who has never been guilty of anything worse than political conniving, has managed to prove himself a cop by Dudley’s entirely corrupt standards, while simultaneously demonstrating that he truly ‘doesn’t have to do it the way his father did’.
The last five minutes is crap; a sudden resurrection and happy romantic ending for Bud White and his hooker with a heart of gold, a medal for Eckley, and about 270 seconds of elaborate expository dialogue for those too lazy to pay attention to the preceding 133 minutes of film-making, or (ghod forbid) read the book. But as I have the movie on videotape, it’s no problem for me to hit STOP and then REWIND when I see Eckley holding up his badge and walking into the oncoming headlights.
I almost listed Fincher as a fave, but there is so much wrong with even the Fincher movies I like that I just can’t do it. He’s a fabulous stylish director, and I suppose directors shouldn’t be blamed for the shortcomings of the scripts they bring to life, but emotionally, I tend to do so anyway. FIGHT CLUB mostly stops working for me when I reflect that, given the big reveal towards the end of the film, members of Fight Club would not have been beating hell out of each other, but would, rather, have spent hours every week punching themselves repeatedly in the face. Once you understand that, well, yes, it really does bring the essential psychosis underlying the teachings of Tyler Durden irrefutably front and center… but to me, it also shoots a pretty gaping hole in the film’s primary premise.
I like Del Toro a great deal, but it is mostly based on that fabulous HELLBOY movie. I haven’t yet had a chance to see PAN’S LABRYNTH or THE ORPHANAGE; moviegoing (or renting) in my house tends to be a collective effort, and I haven’t been able to work up a concensus for either of those films to date.
I’m thinking of doing a blog post tracing all my listed favorite directors from the early 80s and showing just where I think each of their trains jumped the track. You may be interested; most likely, however, you’ll just end up revolted. (I have a feeling we vastly disagree on GANGS OF NEW YORK, just for one.) But we’ll see if I get the time to write and post it, which probably won’t be today.
Thanks for the attention.
“Headline” status here is slightly less prestigious than being a repeat TalkBacker on AICN, but thanks anyway.
To address your specific - and numerous - points:
I enjoyed Body Heat, which I snuck out to the living room after lights out and watched on HBO at least twice during my turbulent junior high years. For me, Richard Crenna wil always be The Guy Who was Too Stupid to Realize a Hot Dame Like Kathleen Turner Would Want Him Dead (and Col. Trautmann), and Mickey Rourke still showed the promise he’d fully realize in Wild Orchid 2. But I had such a violent, reverse peristalsic reaction the The Big Chill I don’t think I ever recovered.
My Ron Howard comments stand. When he stuck with the harmless stuff - like Splash and Coccoon - that lingering Happy Days taint was fine, but even his Big Movies are too sterile and sitcom-y.
Revisiting Scorsese, it’s really only in the last ten years that his status as “must watch” has slipped. Actually, you can go back to Casino, as redundant a movie as ever has been made and inferior to Goodfellas in almost every way. Before that, the only one of his movies I’d call nigh unwatchable is New York, New York (well, and Bad, is you want to count that).
First Morris now John Sayles.Up until recently I loved just about everything he did (in addition to the ones you mentioned, I’ll add Men With Guns and Limbo). But Silver City was where Sayles finally let his vitriol overcome his good sense. Polemics generally make for bad movies, but as far as I’m concerned the rest of his stuff is pretty damn great.
I’ll have to try your solution to Confidential’s ending. And Del Toro produced The Orphanage, but didn’t direct it.
Memoir of an Invisible Man wasn’t Carpenter’s fault. William Goldman recounts script-doctoring it (for Ivan Reitman) in one of his books; Chase insisted the film be about the “loneliness” of invisibility instead of, y’know, jokes. And Chase’s presence was what got the film greenlit, so he got what he wanted.
Goldman never saw the final version (by his own admission), so he might not be the best judge of the finished product. Besides, I don’t think Carpenter would’ve had too hard a time pressing his advantage with a guy whose previous starring roles was in Nothing But Trouble.
Andy Tennant (Fools Rush In, Sweet Home Alabama, Ever After, Anna and the King, Hitch).
Nah, I’m just shitting you.