Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

#50: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)

I decided to start with a few movies that are probably not entirely stellar in everyone's book, but made lasting impressions on me one way or another; as Steven says, more faves than undeniable classics (later for the latter). Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—or, according to "Mad" magazine, "Botch Casually & the Somedunce Kid"—was just another Friday night at the movies in junior high. But a few months later I found a copy of William Goldman's screenplay in mass market paperback and was fascinated with the structure and syntax of it, the CUT TOs and FADE IN ONs and so forth, and the way that all those elements with the dialogue told a story. Then I went to see the movie again and again for a time. I see now that it doesn't amount to that much—the broad humor, the jokey camaraderie between Butch and Sundance, and the various musical interludes scattered along the way often seem to me basically dreadful. But it's almost always entertaining and comes with numerous memorable moments (e.g., Sundance: "Can I move?"). It's notably good on the bittersweet inevitability of the ends of things, and was set up unusually well to wield the point, effectively equating the end of the '60s with the closing of the western frontier and the coming of the movies, or something like that. I couldn't find a clip of the saddest scene in the whole thing, when Sundance's girlfriend tells Butch and Sundance she's decided to head back to the States and wait for them to meet her there. All three know she's leaving because she doesn't want to see them die, and that their deaths are not far off. I remember recognizing it as the way a lot of people seemed to feel about things then, even though, just like in the movie, there was a lot of forced hilarity going on at the same time.

"Raindrops keep fallin' on my head / But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turnin' red" 

"Mad" magazine movie parody titles

Phil #50: The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)
Steven #50: Under Fire (Roger Spottiswoode, 1983)

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001)

It causes me anxiety to remember that Barbara Ehrenreich's participant/observer-style examination of the plight of the American underclass actually took place late in the Clinton adminstration, when the U.S. economy by all indications was roaring and good times were upon the land. I really hate to think what it must be like now. Like so many great things, Ehrenreich's strategy for this experiment, which takes its place alongside the legacy of such writers as Jack London and George Orwell, is the soul of simplicity. Parachuting into Florida, Maine, and Minnesota with only a car ("Rent-A-Wrecks"), money enough for a place to stay, and an ATM card for food if she absolutely must, Ehrenreich posed as a housewife returning to the workforce with minimal skills and experience and then attempted to survive. "The idea was to spend a month in each setting and see whether I could find a job and earn, in that time, the money to pay a second month's rent," she writes. All things considered, even these basic terms and the levels of support she allowed herself might reasonably be deemed cushy by anyone actually living the life. She lands jobs as a nursing home aide, a house cleaner, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. The results are predictable enough—there's a whole lot of soul crushing going on out there. Well-meaning friends of Ehrenreich encouraged her to skip the field work and just do the math, but if she'd taken their advice she'd never have found out some of the hidden realities she uncovers here, which are almost beyond imagining for many in privileged positions. For example, Ehrenreich details how the cost of living is not just proportionally higher for the underclass, but often is actually higher too. If a person can't afford to pay the deposits required to secure an apartment, and has no resources to borrow the money, the only choice left for many is taking rooms in cheap motels, paying by the week or night—and even cheap motels can cost well upwards of a thousand dollars a month. Obviously staying in a motel is intended as a stopgap measure but Ehrenreich makes all too clear how easy it is to slip into vicious cycles of economic entrapments. People in these positions are perilously close to disaster, day in and day out, and often they don't take good care of themselves either, eating poorly and eschewing exercise. Medical care, of course, tends to be out of reach. And I haven't even started on the realities of the kinds of jobs Ehrenreich took, which I happen to know some of from periods working as a nursing home aide myself and in a K-Mart. This is a bleak and tremendously valuable book and warrants continual updating. I wish I had a fraction of the courage Ehrenreich demonstrates here.

In case it's not at the library.

Underwater Moonlight (1980)

The second album by the Soft Boys was pure revelation when I finally caught up with it, a few years after Robyn Hitchcock was fully embarked on his solo career, with and without the Egyptians. Already Hitchcock's trademark wry European surrealism cross-pollinated with New Wave sonics is fully on display: "You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching out under my chin / Now there's tiny insects showing through / And all them tiny insects look like you," he casually tosses off on "Kingdom of Love." The album opener, "I Wanna Destroy You" is an ostensible anti-war sentiment that sets out to flatten you with all its might. The expressions of love, as on "I Got the Hots" or "Insanely Jealous" (which reports jealousy of, among other things, the people that you see, the people that aren't me, the places that you go, the people that you know, the hairs upon your back, the spiders in your path) are just barely this side of unhinged. The context, the primary feature, and the raison d'etre all through is crunchy, pile-driving, Brit-derived rock 'n' roll at full propulsion, the sound of guitar strings snapping on open chords played hard, with Hitchcock's adenoidal boarding-school twit vocals riding the top with variously sweet melodies. The original vinyl LP was nearly perfect, one to flip over and over and over. Some 20 years later came a reissue with seven or eight extras (one, a cover of Syd Barrett's "Vegetable Man," had previously appeared on some of the LP editions) and a whole second disc of live performance/rehearsals from the time, known as ...And How it Got There. I'm rarely one to complain about excesses of the things I like, but the reissue has never hit me with the same force as the original, which just means, I suppose, that I need to learn how to apportion my things more carefully. Because actually, taken on a case by case basis, a number of the added tracks are among those I enjoyed most in revisiting the album recently: "Strange," with its eerie and beautiful harmonies and spare arrangement, "Where Are the Prawns?," which rocks a good deal, and "Black Snake Diamond Rock," which also rocks a good deal (and is not to be confused with an early solo album, Black Snake Diamond Röle). This is good stuff, bringing interesting variety to an already impressive set. But the original 10 remain as fresh and weird and potent as the day I first heard them, raving up at will and putting themselves across effortlessly.

The Future (2011)

Germany/USA, 91 minutes
Director/writer: Miranda July
Photography: Nikolai von Graevenitz
Music: Jon Brion
Editor: Andrew Bird
Cast: Miranda July, Hamish Linklater, David Warshofsky, Joe Putterlik, Isabella Acres

There's a fair number of disclaimers I need to hit with this one so I will just get right to it. This is one of those pictures I would not think could ever work—even, or maybe I should say especially, after actually seeing it. But both times I have seen it now I have come away in something of a not entirely pleasurable daze. So the first disclaimer has to be the obligatory SPOILER ALERT. I think much of the impact turns on a particular plot point, which I will talk about beyond the jump, a plot point that for me was entirely unexpected, for which I was not prepared, and that utterly floored me. Yeah, it still works fine knowing it ahead of time, as I discovered looking at The Future again. But spoiler rules are spoiler rules, so there you go.

There's also a matter of director/writer Miranda July's steely determination to operate within the dimensions of a twee preciosity. The inclination was a good deal more pronounced in her 2005 debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it's here too. I would argue she's shrewd about the way she goes about using it, ultimately playing very hard against expectations even as she packs this full of familiar indie mumblecore-type gestures, with self-involved 20somethings (who are actually 30something, as we shortly discover) living their ironic alternative lifestyles with pluck and humor, buoyed by a stream of wide-eyed and gentle knowing sarcasm that threatens constantly to tip over into bitterness and bad temper.

Facebook 50 '11: Introduction

Last year a friend (Phil Dellio) invited another friend (Steven Rubio) and myself to participate in a countdown of our 50 favorite movies. It was staged in a Facebook group—Phil had just completed another countdown exercise in another Facebook group with another friend (Scott Woods), which was devoted to 100 favorite songs. I had some impression that Phil's impetus for these countdowns grew at least as much out of an infatuation with The Social Network as from an appreciation for Facebook, about which most of the planet now appears to be variously dubious. But the turn of a decade, approximately, is usually a good time (read: excuse) for copious list-making anyway and I was happy to sign on. And so we went at it, at a rate of two picks per week each (I posted on Tuesdays and Fridays) for nearly six months, with a few dozen others cheering and jeering us along in comments.

Though I have made many song and album lists, I had tried only once before, in the '90s, to formally make a list of favorite movies, and then it was just a top 10, riddled with so many ties and also-rans and otherwise yoking in so many titles along the way that I think I managed to mention nearly three dozen movies when it was all said and done. (Before that I had long nursed a favorite three, all of which have place names for titles, but only one of which appeared as a pick on this list; explanations forthcoming.)

Bad Behavior (1988)

Mary Gaitskill's first collection of stories remains daring and remarkable to this day, I think, assiduously working further edges of conventional propriety with dedication and nerve. It's arguable enough that these stories are sensational simply for the sake of winning attention, but I think there's more to them. They are populated and overpopulated with prostitutes, practicing sadomasochists, and fucked-up Americans of many stripes, usually urban creatures operating out of New York or various points elsewhere, such as San Francisco and Michigan. Young women turn to prostitution to make ends meet. Grown adults in marriages carry on empty affairs, or indulge mockable perversions. People in these stories keep trying to connect but are thwarted by the static noise of sex and all its confusions, most often the confusion with love. One of the best stories here, "Something Nice," tells about a john who fancies himself apart and above the exploitation in which he regularly indulges, and falls in love with a prostitute. Later, after she has left the trade and he sees her in public with a boyfriend, she pretends not to know him. He is devastatingly humiliated. Perhaps the most famous story here, "Secretary"—because it was made into a decidedly minor indie movie in the '90s—is also one of the most puzzling and least effective, relying heavily on a tendency to reduce characters and situations to ciphers that don't compute; it appears to be trying to work as some kind of representational allegory. At those times it feels like Gaitskill is attempting to have her cake and eat it too, so to speak—attempting to extract the pathos she knows well in these empty middle-class lives even as she ruthlessly, casually, and heartlessly makes fun of them And Everything They Stand For. Better when she just goes right at the poignant details and lets the stories sort themselves out, as in the long hodgepodge of the last story, "Heroes," with all the siblings of two generations coming and going and some characters that seem flatly unbelievable, until the totality of the events recounted mounts to an impressive presence, and one finds oneself half in love with a few of them, and feeling as though one knows them all very well and cares what happens to them. It's no wonder that this was taken as an auspicious first book—it is.

In case it's not at the library.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

I find myself of several minds on this decidedly strange set by singer/songwriter Jeff Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel. On balance they fall on the positive side—which is just another way of saying I like it a lot, even though I see the various problems plain. There's a lot of adenoidal yelpin' and wailin' contained herein, more than I usually have the tolerance for and most of it dallying on the borders of the dread twee. Directly so, in fact, with "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One" to open, followed immediately by "The King of Carrot Flowers Pts Two & Three." The various eccentricities of instrumentation—accordion, cornet, flugelhorn, bowed banjo, etc., etc.—are whimsical unto the death. It's folk music on its face, with forerunners Camper Van Beethoven and Beat Happening attempting to enclose it at either end of a spectrum. It's not afraid to swell the bottom and rock out awhile when it has a mind, most obviously on the imposing "Holland, 1945." I haven't tried much to puzzle out if the strange fragments of lyrics floating by add up to anything. They're weird and that's enough for me. There's the aforementioned king of carrot flowers, there's a two-headed boy, and, indeed, as promised, there's an aeroplane over the sea. These various nouns are combined with verbs and adjectives and the syntax all seems correct. Hell if I know what it's going on about, however. But Jeff Mangum, who wrote and sings most of these songs, seems to mean every syllable. That feeling is quite strong. And there are so many strange winning moments swirling about this, musically in the various mash-ups of sound achieved or when the cornet sounds impossibly, unbearably sweet in passages. Mangum is frequently at the head of calibrated yet powerfully moving performances; he flails at his acoustic guitar with precision and poise and lets the strange words uncork at the top of his lungs. It excites a kind of awe in such moments, so willfully dwelling in the place it has chosen, and respect too, the kind of feelings I also have for Frank Zappa or Todd Rundgren—brainy (maybe overly so), musical, restless, ruthlessly creative. Obviously everything has been poured into this—indeed, it is practically the last thing we have heard from Mangum and this band since. But what is it? Devastatingly original, we can start there for sure.

L'Avventura (1960)

Italy/France, 143 minutes
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Tonino Guerra
Photography: Aldo Scarvada
Music: Giovanni Fusco
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma
Cast: Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari, Dominique Blanchar, James Addams, Lelio Luttazi

The last time I looked at L'Avventura I found to my surprise that it went by lickety-split fast for a slow-moving movie nearly two and a half hours long. It struck me as lean and supple and basically in full control of its powers. Yet it's very likely that L'Avventura may be the single most disappointing movie I've ever seen, when I saw it the first time, looking forward from its length and reputation and the general contours of its storyline to something narratively engaging and instead finding what looked and felt like a puffed-up (and boring) piece of cruelly deliberate aimlessness.

It might have had something to do with the circumstances—that first look was at a VHS tape checked out from the library. I'm sure most would agree that's not the way to see Michelangelo Antonioni's widely hailed and regarded masterpiece. In fact, I haven't yet had (or anyway taken) the opportunity to see it on a big screen; the sense I get, not just from the tenor of the praise but from the way the visuals have since caught me, is that this is one that likely improves with size, and the bigger the screen and the house and the more packed you can get it, the better. Otherwise it's a little bit of a crapshoot.

1. Chills, "Song for Randy Newman, Etc." (1992)

(listen)

I like how Chills songwriter and mainstay Martin Phillipps tries so hard to make this as particular to a concrete place as he can, to bucolic New Zealand. "In New Zealand our volcanoes and towns / Rest together in peace, keep their roots in the ground," he nonchalantly leads with on one verse. New Zealand, yeah, right. This song contains one of the most plain universal themes I've ever heard, laid out and rendered flat and bland and stripped down to the essentials of a singer and keyboards, masking itself in them, charting the dark night of the creative soul behind private choices and pains. All of us are implicated one way or another. Even the desperate name-checking—Randy Newman in the title only the most obvious, perhaps because those are his piano licks providing accompaniment. But there's another handful or so of usual suspects lurking and darting about the passageways of this deceptive little three-minute ballad ("Wilson, Barrett, Walker, Drake," Phillipps reels them off at one point). It's so full of humility and yet so arrogant and so certain of what it knows and resigned to it that it transcends and leaves behind the downer vibe it carries like a cross. I seem to keep saying things like that a lot, making excuses perhaps for a bunch of downbeat songs picked by a gloomy man. Looking over the last 15 or 20 on this list, oh hell the whole thing, I can see it fits a pattern. There's self-pity here (as there is in "Nightime" and "Somebody to Lay Down Beside Me" and down the line). Certainly self-obsession. But all of them, from Martin Phillipps to Alex Chilton to Jonathan Richman and all the others, also make a case, simply by doing what they do, for dignity and for cheer too, for staying engaged with the best of all things, however one may find them, and whatever pains they bring with them. Because the one thing we know is that there will be pain. Martin Phillipps makes that point here, but he also describes as poignantly as anywhere I know the rewards, with his elegant description of a songwriter's powers: "Can you hear sounds forming in your head / Do they say more than you've ever said." The answer is yes, I have heard them, hundreds of times, here and a thousand places. I can hear them still and they still say that much.

2. Big Star, "Nightime" (1974)

(listen)

At the time I was getting to know this song, in the mid-'80s with the vinyl release of the Third album by Big Star with the big blue cover and liner notes by Howard Wuelfing, I was pretty busy myself with a life full of "At night time I go out and see the people," and I felt about it much the same way the singer here sounds, dismal and sour and maybe a little studiously bored. "And dressing so sweet, all the people to see"—there we go. Those details caught my attention but really it was the mood of it that seemed to swallow me whole, even from the first, a sound that runs all through the near-score of great tracks that cluster around this album. But gradually I focused on this song as I came to realize the plight of the singer was my own at the time. "I'm walking down the freezing street / Scarf goes out behind," he sings. It sounds like the loneliest street of all time. I think I walked it too. Then suddenly the song swells into its raw climax, a bleating from the bottom of the soul that never plays quietly in the background for me: "Get me out of here / get me out of here / I hate it here / get me out of here." I connected with what this song was saying and with how it felt all at the same time, and in many ways I followed that trebling vocal performance across a couple thousand miles, Pied Piper style, into a new life in a new city. This is really a dark moment that is captured here, but rendered so purely and so absolutely that it becomes a moment of exaltation as much as anything, and hope too.