Goodfellas (1990)

USA, 146 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese
Photography: Michael Ballhaus
Editors: James Y. Kwei, Thelma Schoonmaker
Cast: Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Mike Starr, Frank Vincent, Chuck Low, Henny Youngman, Jerry Vale, Michael Imperioli, Illeana Douglas, Vincent Gallo, Catherine Scorsese, Debi Mazar, Samuel L. Jackson, Welker White

Goodfellas is the first movie since Mean Streets on which director Martin Scorsese took a writing credit. Somehow that helps me make sense of where I think it fits among his films—on the short list of his best. As brash and kinetic and sustained as anything he has done, it is personal, defiantly anti-formal (all rules delimiting voiceover narration and freeze-frames cavalierly tossed, for example), and a critical twist on the operatics of gangster pictures as we had understood them until then. If, like Pulp Fiction, it now has much to answer for in terms of setting in motion clichés and other noxious pop culture memes still calcifying (looking at you, retro lounge), this original suffers none of their deficiencies.

In fact, that is one of its great surprises again and again. I am always impressed by the pure crackling energy of Goodfellas. Somebody in the special features on the DVD remarks that no one flipping through TV channels and landing on Goodfellas has ever changed the channel again until the movie is finished. It's true that it is insanely engaging, with a powerful narrative current. Part of the trick is the shift in focus, which moves away from the wood-paneled and predictably corrupting counsels of power of the Godfather franchise (or even De Palma's Scarface) and instead concerns itself solely with the foot soldiers of the criminal enterprise, out hustling to earn. It's the same sickness of the soul, but now it's Chekhovian rather than Shakespearean.

Johnny Rivers, "The Snake" (1966)

(listen)

The album pictured above, ...And I Know You Wanna Dance, was one of the first I ever owned, at the age of approximately 11, courtesy of the Columbia Record Club, which I joined in the mid-'60s with my brother as self-styled tycoon paperboys with money to burn. What I didn't know until a recent visit to Wikipedia is that it is actually Johnny Rivers's fourth album traveling under the concept ("recorded LIVE at the Whiskey a Go Go!"). It's the home of the hit single version of "Secret Agent Man," which by itself might make it the most significant of the four. I don't know about that. What I know is that "The Snake," which kicked off the album, plugged into a vaguely toxic gender orientation that appealed to me as an 11-year-old (Rubber Soul's "Run for Your Life" is another, as is much of the Stones' catalog of the mid-'60s, although their music frankly scared me so I didn't become familiar with "Under My Thumb" for many more years)—sneering tough-guy juvenile-delinquent types laying down the law to the ladies. Here it comes in the form of a fable about a poor trusting woman bamboozled by a vicious snake. Yes, that's right, leaving it open to ham-handed interpretations both Biblical and phallic. This may be the best-known song by songwriter Oscar Brown Jr., who elsewise worked eclectically in jazz, civil rights, the theater, and poetry. Rivers is typically in form as one of the great unrecognized rhythm and blues performers (vying for position with his status as one of the great unrecognized singles artists). But needless to say (I hope) I'm less comfortable now with the basic thrust. The real tell, as far as I'm concerned, is the goofy pinched mocking falsetto Rivers employs for the woman's voice, the woman in this story being monumentally dumb of course. There's a lot of bridling yet socially acceptable contempt here, which makes it an interesting period piece if nothing else.

Taxi Driver (1976)

#8: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

It seems like I've been talking about Bernard Herrmann a fair amount recently—he wrote the scores for a good many of Hitchcock's best pictures, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He wrote the scores for Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and for a dozen or so episodes each of "Twilight Zone" and the "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." He even contributed to The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane. Taxi Driver is the last picture he worked on, shortly before his death toward the end of 1975, and that score is a doozy. The clip of the titles at the first link below suggests how important his work is here to setting the mood and creating the unmistakable feeling of stepping into a dark, mysterious place where not all of the usual rules are going to apply.

You will also, of course, quickly notice that some appreciation must apply to photographer Michael Chapman as well, whose brilliant and eerie first image of the cab from bumper level gliding through the fog is equally affecting, perfectly in synch with the music. And then the fuzzy, lurching, streaming, super-saturated look of the city streets at night that Chapman goes to as needed takes it up another notch. So that gets us approximately two minutes into a film that never once loses its way for nearly two hours.

Wrecking Ball (2012)

This has been a fairly constant companion for me a lot of this year, first in the late spring and summer when I had it installed in my car as a feature for a few months, and more lately just letting it come up a lot in the mix. So I'd like to put a good word in for it at this late hour, though no doubt you have already made up your own mind if you are even interested. It's the first time I've lived with a Bruce Springsteen album so intensely since Tunnel of Love (I did try very hard to establish such things with Human Touch, The Rising, and that Tom Joad one too). There's a lot of earnestness to go around here, but this was a good year for feeling earnest, and it's ultimately nice to experience it so clear-sighted, plainspoken, and yet acute too. For example, one of the most prominent themes in this set puts Springsteen at the back of a boulder pushing it up a hill attempting to reclaim Christianity. Seriously, there's a lot of Jesus and the Bible here, not just sweet beautiful strains of gospel (embedded in his DNA as birthright with rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, and soul). Personally, I've always been comfortable myself with the conception of Jesus the Christ as first and most immaculate hippie—it makes sense on many different levels. But of course exactly that is profoundly rejected by those carrying the biggest megaphones for Christ these days and I really don’t care to discuss it with them. I take it as just another aspect of this bizarro up-is-down world we seem to be living in now—you mean Jesus really didn't favor the poor over the rich, inherit the earth, eye of a camel, all that jazz, OK, whatever. This is the point where I begin to mumble and look down in these conversations. But there is Mr. Bruce Springsteen (as Randy Newman would say) taking it to them on the very issue, at least as far as I can make out, and it's only one of a bunch of things here that manage to touch me really deeply, as heartfelt and profoundly on point, which he has done before. Here, I mostly just appreciate hearing someone say things like "The banker man grows fatter / The working man grows thin," if only as an affirmation of what I see and feel myself. There's all kinds of basic touchstones of specific experience here. "We've been traveling over rocky ground." "This is my confession / I need your heart / In this depression / I need your heart." "We are alive." Et cetera. And that goes for this too: "If I had me a gun / I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight." I know, I know, it's all role playing in the end with these things, but that's also my point. Signals such as these helped me understand I wasn't traveling alone this year.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975)

When I finally got to Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir it was nothing like I expected, and much more. Much more—and much less, too—than an ordinary memoir, the experimental flavor of it penetrates and suffuses and carries away much of the simple factual material. This goes beyond showing how events felt to showing how the unconscious experienced the events, and invented events of its own to absorb the blows of deeply foreign experience. It is full of strange dreams and fears torqued to maximum impact—the anger and sorrow and impossibility of such a transition are preserved almost perfectly, even as the homely details are mostly left behind. Thus, surprisingly, it becomes a story of great spirit encountering the strangely physical. There's not a lot to hang a hat on here—very little directly about language adjustments, ethnic self-awareness and accommodation, neighborhoods, schools, kindly adults. They are there, make no mistake—but their context is fierce and fantastic. One of the great things Kingston does is put the focus on Chinese culture and her heritage. The Western sophistication she has achieved speaks for itself, and is the perfect vehicle for saying what she's got to say. The hardships and privations can be wrecking. A raid, as recalled by Kingston's mother: "The villagers broke in the front and the back doors at the same time, even though we had not locked our doors against them. Their knives dripped with the blood of our animals.... Your aunt gave birth in the pigsty that night. The next morning when I went for water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well." Unflinching stuff, yet followed by a beautiful and complex tale spun out of her mother's "talk-story" that she lulled her children to sleep with, about a powerful swordswoman and heroine, a shiny brilliant character. A variation of Wonder Woman, to the Western comic book reader. The story is bold and swift and absorbing. The whole book is great.

In case it's not at the library.

Slanted and Enchanted (1992)

I saw Pavement in 1995 or thereabouts and I remember it was a very fine show—roaring loud, seductive, insinuating, with surprisingly powerful currents, and always interesting. I surged with the crowd and didn't want it to end, etc. I'm serious. I was still there pounding for more when the house lights went up. They were great. But shortly after that the mystery about the appeal of this quixotic unit ensued as if it had never been cleared up even for a moment. I find it hard to connect with the albums, even the consensus best, such as this debut. Or maybe I find myself forgetting how to. I've been puzzling over it again trying to figure out something to say about this album which I think meant so much to so many. At one time I felt like I was rotating between separate tribes devoted to My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, and Pavement—blobs of adoration floating around out there and not intersecting much. On the Venn diagram it would be three distinct circles. They all participated to a certain extent, among many others, in a certain vogue of the time for elaborately disaffected song titles, so here: "Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era," "Zurich Is Stained," "Chesley's Little Wrists," "In the Mouth a Desert," "Summer Babe (Winter Version)," so on so forth, there are 14 songs here. There are certainly hooks, things to grab onto, as I just now noticed one welling up out of the end of "No Life Singed Her," but they don't seem to be occurring within the structure of songs as such. To me, at their best, when I think I might be getting it, they are album artists working in the broad 40-minute scope, with a ground of sound based on ramshackle 2 guitars bass drums+ interplay that's almost not sloppy, and from that emerges this little parade of surprises: a chanted chorus that takes on momentum, lots of guitar riffs finding a way, and often an evident willingness to simply let it all ride, or stop, with breaks for adjustments every two or three minutes, meaning that's how the tracks go by. You don't necessarily wait for a certain song but for moments that aren't always quite where you thought you remembered they'd be, but it's all right because there's something interesting coming along now you'd forgotten. It's never quite what you think it is. The cover art is not misleading, I'll put it that way. At the moment, "Two States" is my favorite song—because it's the one playing.

3:10 to Yuma (1957)

USA, 92 minutes
Director: Delmer Daves
Writers: Halsted Welles, Elmore Leonard
Photography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Music: George Duning
Editor: Al Clark
Cast: Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, Felicia Farr, Leora Dana, Henry Jones, Richard Jaeckel, Robert Emhardt

It's interesting to watch virtually back to back the two movie versions of the 1953 Elmore Leonard story, "Three-Ten to Yuma," made 50 years apart out of the same story—indeed, the same screenplay, as Halsted Welles (who died in 1990) gets first writing credits in both. Many of the same plot points and even scenes and lines of dialogue recur in both. Yet they are two rather different films. The 2007 remake is a remake, first, hallmark of a metastasizing trend of the 2000s (and counting), patching in state-of-the-art action stylings by expanding a good deal, and not unsuccessfully, on the story's middle section. The original eschews a lot of the fancy set pieces of the remake, no doubt in line with budget considerations, instead focusing on the story much more as suspense chamber piece with Rod Serling-level ironies of human foible.

For anyone interested in treatments of Elmore Leonard stories they are a particularly interesting pair, both coming from outside of the '80s and '90s bubble, when Leonard may have been coasting a little on the superstar status he enjoyed. (I need to see Get Shorty and Out of Sight again but I remember them now as bloated and self-satisfied and was definitely underwhelmed.) Both versions of 3:10 to Yuma, however, are worth seeing I think (and then, with me, it's on to catch up with the FX TV show Justified, which I suddenly realize I have been hearing good things about for years now). But if you only have time for one—and I know how that goes, life is short after all—then this 1957 version is your pick. The usual spoiler disclaimer verbiage goes here.

Meat Puppets, "Two Rivers" (1985)

(listen)

I think most Meat Puppets true believers tend to prefer the breakthrough Meat Puppets II over the follow-up, Up on the Sun, which provides the home for this. Fair enough, that's true enough, it's probably the better album, and certainly the bigger and better surprise. But I have to say this is my one favorite song by the band, if forced to pick a single favorite (which, I know, these things never happen).  It's another one of those more or less obscurities—never released as a single, always occupying the #11 spot in the sequencing (deep into the vinyl side 2), etc. But wow, once cranked up, it just sparkles—a word I choose deliberately, because "sparkles" is exactly what guitarist/songwriter Curt Kirkwood manages with the beautiful, haunting noise he makes with the guitar, the hook that makes this song, which glitters across the surface passing through like the self-same waters of the title, reflecting sunshine. That sound somehow encapsulates a lot of the themes the whole album implicitly (and explicitly) plays with, hard flat desert sunlight, the feel of an epic landscape, stripped down and harsh, but lushly beautiful with fantastic colors. The geography they lived in and knew. Out of that this Arizona power trio concocted the studious country-inflected groove so familiar from their peak. Remember, the first album was a bit of a hardcore punk-rock exercise. So they covered a lot of ground to finally arrive at this quasi-Grateful Dead quasi-R.E.M. brooding style of feeling one's way through a jam, tightening it up and focusing it sharp. For the moment anyway they are verging on territory of acts such as Neil Young and the Band, tapping deep into veins of American experience in a way that's hard to explain. It's another absolute beauty.

Casablanca (1942)

#9: Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

We've been at this for awhile and I'm tired, plus this one falls in the category of Everybody Already Said It. Therefore I'm going to take the easy way out and point to a review I wrote for my blog last spring. Maybe you can find something new in that. The short version: I've been watching Casablanca nearly all of my adult life, starting back when it was cut to pieces for commercial breaks on late-night broadcast TV, and I've been all over the map: in thrall to its screenplay, both at the level of the endlessly witty and quotable dialogue (the clip at the link is reasonably representative) and also at the level of its densely plotted structure ... and contemptuous of (or maybe I should dial that back to saddened by) its "of the times" racism and sexism. Mostly I have loved it. The last time I looked I liked it fine. I even thought I saw a way of looking at it that cleared up the sexism, maybe. People will be looking at Casablanca for as long as they remember Humphrey Bogart and World War II and the movies—that is, approximately until Cormac McCarthy's The Road becomes reality. Or, as the headline for a story about a Bogart retrospective we once ran in the college paper I worked at put it: "Here's kids looking at you, Bogey." Forever.

"I like to think that you killed a man—it's the romantic in me."

Casablanca review

Phil #9: On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) (scroll down)
Steven #9: A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

I think there's a powerful undercurrent of the modern in this deceptive classic American horror story of and for children. I remember reading it for school at some point, I think in junior high (it couldn't have been easy!). But the more you look at the thing the more sophisticated and almost impenetrable it becomes. Perhaps the most modern part of it is the way it is actually the story, not of two children, or a possibly mad governess, or a haunted house and ghosts, but of a manuscript. The manuscript is in the possession of one "Douglas," who reads it for the entertainment of a gathering on a country outing, though none of them are ever heard from again once the governess' story, told in her manuscript, begins. At that level, of course, one soon loses all bearings, occupying the fevered brain of a frightened and/or hysterical young woman in her first real job, which she has taken (or claims to have taken) under unsettling circumstances and conditions. She sees ghosts. No one else does. She thinks the children do too. But that's not entirely clear. On the other hand, when the governess confides in the housekeeper about her experiences and describes the ghosts, strangers to her, the housekeeper recognizes them as people who have previously been involved with the children but are now dead. All this is gleaned from typical enough late James dense passages, a blizzard of intricate cross-hatching language with long tangled sentences in fat paragraphs that sprawl across most of a page, constantly qualifying anything that resembles a direct assertion. It is a kind of narrative optical illusion which looks like many things depending on how you look at it, but each with some flaw that throws the whole thing into ambiguity: A ghost story, except only one person seems to see the ghost. A woman coming undone but she's not the only one. At the end, she might even offer a flavor of the Jim Thompson psychopath, casually killing, but talking about it so elliptically you almost miss the horror show. And it's even possible here to see the children themselves as rageful aggressors, manifesting symptoms of sexual abuse. It's practically anything you want it to be and it's just a real corker.

"interlocutor" count = 3/97 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)