#41 - BROADCAST NEWS
1987; dir. James L. Brooks; starring Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks, William Hurt
I’m obsessed with the idea of “movies for grown-ups.” Maybe because I was an old soul who always kinda knew he wanted to run away and go “live life” already, but I always gravitated more toward “the realities of being an adult” than the “fantasies of being a teenager” kinda movies - and when I newly see one such film, even as a dang-ass adult, it makes me feel rich and satiated.
Broadcast News is the platonic ideal of a “movie for grown-ups.” It’s charming, sharp, sensitive, funny, melancholy, and radiating with delicious nuance. It depicts both the pleasures and paradoxes of being an adult in such an engaging way. I hope it helps some other 14-year-old weirdo who loves wearing blazers, too.
VERDICT: STAYS AND PLAYS
#42 - BRUCE LEE: HIS GREATEST HITS
1971-1978; The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death; starring Bruce Lee
These movies are so entertaining, and so weird!
Beyond the tantalizing, brutal choreography and iconography, these films feel personal, spiky, and idiosyncratic. They’re all clearly filtered through a human being, not “the idea of what action movies should be.” Hence, there’s strange set pieces of broad humor, incendiary politics, and a shattering of distance between star and audience member - even when he’s looking hot as shit kicking the shit out of 900 people and one flying dog. He’s doing it all for us, as himself. Inspiring!
Obvious keepers!
VERDICT: STAYS AND PLAYS
#43 - BRUTE FORCE
1947; dir. Jules Dassin; starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford
Explicit didacticism in narrative cinema is hard to get away with. Generally, I think it’s more compelling and emotionally effective when an audience is given raw information and asked to come to their own conclusions, rather than being told the conclusion within said information.
But the crime and genre cinema of this period through maybe Psycho (or maybe its peak is the Twilight Zone?) is chock-full of studio-mandated didacticism; of telling the audience the point of what we’re watching directly. I get it, it comes straight from theater and Greek choruses and Shakespearean soliloquies and whatnot.
But it sorta tanks Brute Force! When it narrows the focus on a personal journey, and gets appropriately brutal with it, it cooks. But the scope just widens and widens, and the “points about society” suffocate any room for an audience to exist within the film.
VERDICT: GOES AWAY
#44 - BUBBA HO-TEP
2002; dir. Don Coscarelli; starring Bruce Campbell, Ossie Davis, Bob Ivy
There’s an appealing warmness and melancholy, and gestures at maturity in what is fundamentally a film about people who believe they are (or, are?) Elvis and John F. Kennedy fighting a cursed mummy. It’s almost more interested in being one of my beloved “movies for grown-ups” than being a wonky genre flick - and when it locks into these vibes, it feels like nothing you’ve seen before.
Unfortunately, it still has to go through the business of being a possibly-Elvis-JFK-fight-mummy movie, and that’s a lot of turns just through its one-liner premise, and because it keeps shifting and pitching new premises, it foundationally feels like all set-up without enough payoff. It’s obsessed with movement without momentum.
VERDICT: GOES AWAY
#45 - BUFFALO ‘66
1998; dir. Vincent Gallo; starring Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara
I owe this movie a lot. It was a formative watch, a game-changer that influenced my filmmaking bones in its constructive style, aesthetics, performances, and thematic conclusions. I have separated the art and I appreciate what the art has given me as much as I can…
…but now, the artist. Vincent Gallo, the director, star, composer, and lots of other things, sucks absolute shit. Every story around this movie is a bad one, where Gallo is mean and horrible and sexist and vile and throws everyone who isn’t him under the bus. And while it could be convenient to separate all of that from the movie itself, the movie itself is about a mean and horrible and sexist and vile guy who throws everyone who isn’t him under the bus - until the very end when he gets to redeem himself through the main person he destroyed throughout.
This act of narcissism and psychological torture is now too transparent. And so, I thank Buffalo ‘66 for everything it’s given me from a nuts-and-bolts-and-love-of-the-craft perspective, and I no longer need to have it on my shelf for its positive attributes to be in me, nor want its negative attributes getting in the way.
VERDICT: GOES AWAY
Thanks for checking out Greg’s Blu-Rays A-To-Z! Next week: Some people play games, some people reveal themselves, some people do one to do the other.