To Duck or Not to Duck: A Closer Look at Chuck Jones

Quick! Think of your favorite Looney Tunes short! Perhaps it’s a Wile E. Coyote or Road Runner cartoon! Or a classic Bugs-Daffy situation which involves them getting into word-wars and “pronoun trouble” over whether it is duck season or rabbit season? Or perhaps it’s one involving that stinking Maurice Chevalier look-a-like Pepe le Pew? The chances are good that the Looney Tunes shorts everyone remembers, knows, and loves were primarily made by one madman: Mr. Charles M. “Chuck” Jones.

"I draw the line."

When we look at the elements that comprise the humorous Looney Tunes aesthetic, we must acknowledge the crucial importance of Chuck’s manic mind which brought us such abstract creations as Marvin the Martian, the hair-monster Gossamer, and Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf—who are self-aware of their ever-lasting battle and who are friends outside of the shorts that pit them as enemies. Looking at the Looney Tunes shorts as kids or even teens, they laugh and excite us to no extent. To use a rough analogy, Looney Tunes is to Disney what jazz is to classical music: both admirable, intellectually-stimulating genres, but with the former being a bit more daring, bawdier, and looser in structure. It improvises like a mad artist hopped up on reefers, pulsating with a tireless, boundless energy. The gags are what keep us coming back to them and what keep them fresh, no doubt. Humor translates well over language barriers; whether dubbed in French, Spanish, Farsi, or the original Mel Blanc-ian English, the Looney Tunes and its stars—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, among others—keep us coming back for years after we’ve outgrown adolescence.

But Jones’ cartoons are ALWAYS different than the work of the rest of the Looney Tunes directors. They hold a special significance—not only in their innovative approach to humor, but also in their bold style and abstract concepts. Jones is one of the most daring auteurs in animation; he is not constrained by animation, but finds deeper and funnier ways to find humor in the most minimalist of efforts. Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, Tex Avery, and Bob Clampett—Jones’ superiors back when he was just a thirty-something in-betweener at Warner Bros.—were primarily gag-driven, broad in their delivery. It was hit-and-miss with their cartoons. They could either found comic-gold (i.e., Freleng’s Pink Panther and Tex Avery’s legendary pairing of Daffy Duck and Porky Pig) or comedic dullness (McKimson’s Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, which are tired, unfunny piles of abuse on a poor, hapless Southern rooster). Their styles certainly never changed throughout the half-century that they were making Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies shorts. Frank Tashlin, the most daring of the early animators, added two key ingredient that many of the other Looney Tunes directors were missing: a frantic, Eisensteinian speed in the editing of the cartoon frames and an emphasis of artistry over humor. His Art-Deco backgrounds, new Scot-Art character designs, and appreciation of cinematic angles in his Looney Tunes cartoons had a huge influence on the budding Charles M. Jones, who struggled to find his funny niche among all of these director-veterans who made shorts before sound was ever introduced. Just for good measure, here's one of Frank Tashlin's Looney Tunes shorts from 1943, "Scrap Happy Daffy," starring Daffy Duck and Adolf Hitler (in a batty cameo):

Chuck Jones started out at Leon Schlesinger Productions—a subdivision of Warner Brothers which exclusively made cartoon-shorts—as a “inbetweener” in 1933. He was initially in charge of simply drawing the intermediate frames between two master-drawing poses of a character to provide the key illusion of movement in an era where everything you saw in a cartoon-drawn had to be hand-drawn. Jones quickly rose up the ranks of “Termite Terrace”—the affectionate name given to the ratty, small building where all of the Looney Tunes animators did their best work—and was given the prestigious position of head-director (then called “supervisor”) in 1938. His early efforts show promise but, like all his fellow freshman directors, had too much of a Disney air to them. “Naughty but Mice”—Jones’ fifth short as director—introduced a character that many of the fellow Looney Tunes directors despised: Sniffles the Mouse. His cutesy charm and gullible googly-eyed expression were not welcomed by Jones's producer Leon Schlesinger, who prided himself on separating Looney Tunes's "give-no-fucks" screwball humor from the more family-friendly, innocent Disney series. In a rare direct chat with a head-director (which, according to Freleng, he only did if was losing money), Schlesinger told Jones to either lose the Disney schtick and find his own sense of humor or hit the road.

Presumably Chuck's reaction to being told his ass was on-the-chopping-block.

After many hits-and-misses in his early years, he finally stumbled upon the answer to his problems in the 1942 short, “The Dover Boys at Pimento University.”

The story involved three college Don Juans who must save their collective fiancé from the hands of a bloodthirsty stock villain named Dan Backslide. In it, Jones introduced a revolutionary concept that would become an integral part of the Looney Tunes aesthetic: smear animation. Before it, every frame of a Looney Tunes short would be neatly hand-drawn, and the speed effect which they were then known for came from increasing the frame-rate of the final product when it was shown. But with smear animation, Jones achieved a desired effect of increasing the frantic nature of the cartoon even more than his contemporary Tashlin by asking the inbetweeners to merely smear the intermediate frames that connected the two major poses. To demonstrate, here are five separate stills from a sequence in “The Dover Boys” that show the technique in work. Note that this is a continuous sequence and that stills 3 and 5 are the “master-poses” (i.e., the boundaries that the inbetweeners must bridge together):

Smear animation at work in "The Dover Boys."

Not only did this technique make Jones’ timing crisper than any of his colleagues' cartoons, but it also signaled the first foray into the abstract animation that fascinated the young Jones. When “The Dover Boys” was released, Schlesinger and company were horrified; Chuck was hotly criticized by his own superiors for making abstract drawings that they erroneously labeled “limited animation.” What “Dover Boys” actually does is not limited animation; what "Dover Boys" employs is a manner by which the timing and speed of a cartoon may be increased, thus resulting in bigger laughs. It is artistic genius on Jones’ part—the first of many successes which he would find at Warner Bros.

When Frank Tashlin left animated cartoons for good in 1948 for directing his own live-action features, it left a gaping hole in experimentation at Looney Tunes. Jones, ever the budding intellectual, took Tashlin’s best animators and created his own Animation Dream-Team that would help him create his first bona-fide masterpieces. These included Michael Maltese as a screenwriter, Ken Harris for animation, Maurice Noble for backgrounds--and, of course, Mel Blanc and June Foray as the voices of the Looney Tunes themselves. The following year, the first of these masterpieces arrived with “Fast and Furry-Ous”, the cartoon that introduced the world to Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. The pace was Tashlinesque, the style minimalist, the humor powerful and to-the-point, the themes fatalistic in their cruel torment of the Coyote and his always-doomed-to-failed schemes to capture the Road Runner, the satire understated as the Coyote places his undying trust in the products of the suspiciously-corporate sounding ACME Corporation, and the gags elegantly crafted--all due to Jones’ astounding sense of comedic timing.

From then-on, Jones hit an artistic stride; in 1949 and for much of the 1950s, he would create some of the most recognizable, funniest products that Looney Tunes ever cranked out. Among these include the surrealist fight of animator versus creation in “Duck Amuck”, the science-fiction send-up in “Duck Dodgers in the 24th and ½ Century,” the reduction of Dick Wagner’s 5 hour opus Die Walküre into a 7-minute Bugs and Elmer short in “What’s Opera, Doc?”, and a Marxian (both Karl and Groucho) riff on the word-wars between Bugs and Daffy in the so-called “Hunting Trilogy”—three cartoons where Daffy, in his typically egotistic manner, attempts to best the much-smarter Bugs by pitting him against the hunter Elmer Fudd.

In directing his cartoons, Jones was awarded a freedom of expression unparalleled in Hollywood. His jabs at the corporate world and pop culture were cleverly masked under the guise of a Looney Tunes cartoon at a movie-house—where the kids who saw these cartoons would have these allusions sail right over their heads, and the adults would turn away their heads in blissful ignorance of the hidden realities of Jones’ work. Chuck also discovered that the subjects he was most interested in—classical music, the surreal, and thought-exercises in Sisyphean fate—were best expressed through the manic world of Looney Tunes. He single-handedly turned the studio’s ignored-star Daffy Duck into his own animated muse--an entity into which he could pour his insecurities about himself. As Jones observes:

“Bugs is confident—it shows on his face and everything about him. But Daffy is never sure because somebody may be trying to get whatever he has to his name, which is very little…I’ve never met anybody who didn’t have some of Daffy Duck in them. If somebody’s going to have the courage to become an animated director, they have to have the courage to reach down inside themselves and pull that character outside themselves and become that character. Bugs is an aspiration. Daffy is the realization. You know that that Daffy is within you; and if it’s allowed to get loose, you’d be just like him.”

“Daffy believes that everyone’s out there to do him in—which is a perfectly sound supposition, they are out to do him in. And I understand Daffy better because I was Daffy, and am Daffy. I said to myself, ‘I can dream about Bugs Bunny. But when I wake up, I’m just Daffy.’ And there’s no two ways about that.”

Jones’ work is exemplary because he pushes the Looney Tunes humor to its intellectual breaking-point. He continually asks questions on the nature of humor and personality. As "Duck Amuck” posits, does one need the physical manifestation of a character to recognize the personality that exists inside the character?

His later works “High Note” and “The Dot and the Line” try to find humor in the simplest aspects of life—the former in an unremarkable five-line musical staff, and the latter with only a circle, a straight-line, and a squiggle. The results are remarkable because Jones is able to maximize comedy in “High Note” and pathos in “The Dot and the Line” with very few elements at his disposal.

Jones is the man famous for being able to get a laugh out of a simple eyebrow-wiggle or the design of a character’s eyes; he uses the whole body to express humor, and directed the Man of a Thousand Voices, Mel Blanc, to the best voice-over work in his entire career. He does not let himself become encumbered in gag-humor, but is willing to explore the personalities of his characters. His work takes a humbling look at Daffy Duck, who is sublime in his narcissistic imperfections. Jones’ Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd are considerably different from the other Looney Tunes’ directors; they possess an intelligence and craftiness necessary to complement the slow, steady out-doing of Daffy Duck. Jones’ original characters—Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf, the Coyote and the Road Runner, and Pepe Le Pew—also reflect Jones’ interest in fatalism and destiny. These are characters who are aware of their roles in a 7-minute animated cartoon and who continually attempt to change the course of their fates. But they must find out each time that they are at the mercy of the all-powerful Animator; the journey (i.e., the shorts themselves) manage to entertain us while sadly confirming their lack of power beyond the drawn page. What better example is there than the Sheepdog and Wolf cartoons of Jones’ later period—which feature the two unlikely roommates punching in a time-clock, going about a gag-filled cartoon that ends in devastation for the Wolf, and when the whistle blows, finishing the day with an amicable good-bye as they wish each other good night and “Better luck next time”?

Chuck Jones goes against convention by making classic enemies self-conscious actors in a jokey play-of-life.

When Jones took over Tom and Jerry in 1963, he did not repeat the creative gag-driven bombast of the Hanna-Barbara era, but instead placed the classic cat-and-mouse duo into interesting situations which explored the nature of their on-again, off-again friendship. 1963’s “Snow-Body Loves Me” is a perfect example of this, mixing the abstract designs of his Looney Tunes best with a touching warmth that is atypical of Tom and Jerry but which, in his hands, turns into a pure pathotic moment of victory for the series. Jones gleefully bends the typical rules of an animated cartoon, giving him a chance to explore what makes a character a character.

Jones could not continue his magnificent career to the same defiant heights he took it during his classic period between 1951 and 1957. MGM, which employed Jones during most of the 1960s, closed down its animation department. He had to take on odd jobs here and there, including a memorable turn directing the classic Dr. Seuss short "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" in 1966. He gently appropriates Dr. Seuss' grotesque drawing style to suit his neat-lined approach and adds the element that distinguishes Jones cartoons from any other animators' cartoons: timing. His delicate hand is present on every frame of the special. From the transition of Mary Lou Who's apple to the Grinch's coldly red eye, to the extended long-shot that travels from Whoville to the Grinch's lair, to the slithering Grinch stealing all the contraband of the Whos down in Whoville to the tune of Thurl Ravenscroft singing the Carrollian "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch", to the intricately-drawn backgrounds of the Grinch's lair and the town of Whoville designed by his trusty collaborator Maurice Noble (who also drew the backgrounds to such Jones classics as "What's Opera, Doc?" and "Duck Dodgers in the 24th-1/2 Century"), Jones' lavish style in the Grinch special reaches, perhaps even exceeds, the expressive-artistry bar set by the best of his Looney Tunes shorts. Here's a link to the short on DailyMotion to illustrate what I'm talking about.

With 1967’s “The Bear That Wasn’t” (co-written by none other than the legendary Frank Tashlin who gave Jones the manic inspiration he needed to find his niche), a fitting end came to the Golden Era of Animation and, for the most part, to Chuck's great, unbridled stretch of winning shorts from 1939 to 1967.

He is truly one of the more underrated artists of cinema, which, in my view, is because he chose to make Looney Tunes cartoons. Lots of people assume this means they're merely for quickie viewing-pleasure and not meant to be taken seriously. It's taken on this air of pretentiousness to seriously study those Looney Tunes shorts, and people like Pauline Kael and the like will tell you they're trash and unworthy of serious academic discussion. But I do believe that Jones gives us a lot to work with in the nearly 300+ shorts he did during his long tenure at Termite Terrace, and that, yes, they are worth studying. Jones obviously makes them for kids (the core audience), but like any artist worth their salt who takes pride in what they makes, Jones's cartoons establish behind-the-scenes dialogues with other artists about how to achieve the ultimate in animated-shorts and artistic expression.

I believe what truly defines his work is his rigorous championing of other arts outside of animation. He read a lot, he talked to people and noted down their peculiarities or quirks, he listened to a lot (and I mean a lot) of music, particularly classical music and baroque. He studied the great art movements of his time, and we can see through his progression as an Looney Tunes director that he incorporates these influences in his widely-diverse oeuvre. If you notice, his earlier shorts have the air of classic 30s screwball to them; manic puns rattled off a-mile-of-minute, reminiscent of Preston Sturges's kookiest works or Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938). But as he grew more confident in his abilities as an artist (again, all because he studied painting, architecture, music, etc.), his short-films became much subtler, more sedate, and funnier. He learned the adage that less is more, and it works beautifully for Looney Tunes. By 1955, he could convey to an audience, through the sparse shifting of the construction-worker's eyes in the classic "One Froggy Evening," a sudden change from bemusement....

....to sly greed...

in only two frames. He is a master of suggesting the biggest emotions with the tiniest of details.

I think a lot of today's animators could take lessons from Jones on how to stop wasting precious seconds on superfluous sequences, like the establishment of these vast settings that would look boring if we saw them in live-action, and get right to the meat of the story. There's this tendency in the age of 3D cinema, that MORE IS BETTER, and that the capabilities of CGI animation must be showcased at every given opportunity in order for audiences to be invested in it. Dreamworks and Pixar aren't immune to this problem. And if there's anything Chuck Jones and his ilk show, it's that to be truly artistically superior than anybody else out there, it's always better to be minimalist. Always be on the hunt for where animation can be cut and how one can reduce a lot of talking scenes to their sparse core.

Do not let the bright colors and the frantic pace of the animated cel confuse you; behind all Jones cartoons, there is a more profound, underlying message being woven into the cartoon tapestry. His cartoons showed a man passionately in love with the cartoons—whose whole life philosophy lies embedded with his fascination in the underdogs Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote. As Jones himself says, “The rules are simple. Take your work, but never yourself, seriously. Pour in the love and whatever skill you have, and it will come out.”

Here's an extended list of Chuck's greatest works. The cream-of-the-crop is in astericks, the cream-of-the-crop that are my personal favorites are in bold:

• 1938—The Night Watchman
• 1939—Prest-O Change-O, Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur, Naughty but Mice, Little Lion Hunter, Sniffles and the Bookworm
• 1940—Elmer’s Candid Camera
• 1941—Elmer’s Pet Rabbit
• 1942—Conrad the Sailor, Hold the Lion Please, The Squawkin’ Hawk, *The Dover Boys at Pimento University*, My Favorite Duck, Case of the Missing Hare
• 1943—To Duck or Not to Duck, *Inky and the Minah Bird*
• 1944—Bugs Bunny and the 3 Bears, The Weakly Reporter
• 1945—Odor-Able Kitty, Trap Happy Porky, Hare Conditioned, Hare Tonic
• 1946— Hare-Raising Hare, Fair and Worm-Er
• 1947—Scent-Imental Over You, House-Hunting Mice, Little Orphan Airedale
• 1948—*You Were Never Duckier*, Haredevil Hare, Daffy Dilly, My Bunny Lies Over the Sea, Scaredy Cat
• 1949—Mississippi Hare, Mouse Wreckers, *Long-Haired Hare*, *Fast and Furry-Ous*, *For Scent-Imental Reasons*, *Rabbit Hood*
• 1950—*The Scarlet Pumpernickel*, 8-Ball Bunny, The Ducksters, Rabbit of Seville
• 1951—Scentimental Rodeo, Rabbit Fire, The Wearing of the Grin, Drip-Along Daffy
• 1952—Operation: Rabbit, Feed the Kitty, *Beep-Beep*, Going! Going! Gosh!, Rabbit Seasoning
• 1953—Don’t Give Up the Sheep, Duck Amuck, *Bully for Bugs*, *Duck Dodgers in the 24th and ½ Century*, Duck! Rabbit, Duck!
• 1954—Bewitched Bunny, Baby Buggy Bunny
• 1955—One Froggy Evening, Beanstalk Bunny, Knight-Mare Hare, Rabbit Rampage
• 1956—Broom-Stick Bunny, Gee Whiz-z-z-z-z-z-z, Rocket-Bye Baby, *Deduce, You Say!*
• 1957—Ali-Baba Bunny, What’s Opera, Doc?
• 1958—*Robin-Hood Daffy*, *Hook, Line, and Stinker!*
• 1959—Baton Bunny
• 1960—Fastest with the Mostest, High Note, Ready Woolen and Able
• 1961—The  Abominable Snow-Rabbit, Compressed Hare
• 1962—A Sheep in the Deep, Martian Through Georgia
• 1963—Now Hear This, Transylvania 6-500, Pent-House Mouse
• 1964—Snow-Body Loves Me
• 1965—The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, Tom-Ic Energy
• 1966—The Cat Above and the Mouse Below, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
• 1967—The Bear That Wasn’t.

The Damndest Thing You'll Ever See: Robert Altman's "Nashville" (1975), or America in 160 Minutes

Nashville (1975)

Directed by: Robert Altman 

Rating: ★★★★★ (Masterpiece)

screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury

starring: David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert DoQui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan Nicholls, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, and Keenan Wynn.

Plot rundown: Over the course of a few hectic days in Nashville, Tennessee,  numerous interrelated people prepare for a political music rally as secrets and lies are surfaced and revealed.

Nashville is something else. It's a panoramic view of the Nashville music business in 1975. The story is told over 5 days, as 24--yes, 24--characters go about their business in the country-music Mecca in preparation for a political rally on the fifth day. There's a waitress who wants to desperately sing at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville; the only problem is that she's a terrible singer. There's a slimy country-singer who wants to get into the political game, and sees the rally as a way of announcing his own presidential campaign. There's a folk trio--two guys and a girl--where everybody's cheating on everybody else with each other. There's an old uncle who's coming in from Los Angeles to attend to his wife on his deathbed; he tries to get his niece to be with him when his wife dies, but the niece just wants to hang out with a bunch of country-rock-stars, smoke dope, and be an attentive groupie. There's a psychofreak on a tricycle who gives rides to unsuspecting hitchhikers. There's a mousy blonde woman who just wants to sing to a big crowd of people, but can't seem to find the audience because she's on-the-run from her trucker husband. At the end, these electric, zig-zagging personalities all converge at the Parthenon in Nashville, where the presidential rally/concert for the independent presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker (a perfect shoe-in for Bernie Sanders) takes place. The trailer best explains the seeming lunacy of having 24 main characters in one film:

I saw this magical film for the first time about two years ago, receiving the sleek Criterion Blu-Ray as a Christmas present. Let me tell ya: it had such a profound effect on me, as far as storytelling and emotional investment goes. It manages to do what few films bother to attempt nowadays: it gives you a robust view of a weird and striking society--America in the 1970s--by introducing no less than twenty-four major characters and letting them loose upon one another. It goes that extra mile by getting you so emotionally invested in EACH of these off-beat characters, that it breaks your heart when the film ends. I felt like I knew a whole lot more about how people think, how people interact with one another, the tragedies and the hardships they have to suffer. Nashville gave me that communal sense of belonging. I loved eavesdropping in on Lily Tomlin's character Linnea, a well-meaning housewife who is devoted to her hearing-impaired kids and who is neglected by her lawyer-husband (Ned Beatty). It was utterly heart-wrenching seeing Ronee Blakley's Barbara Jean, a successful and happy country music-star on the outside, suffer nervous breakdowns caused by her pot-bellied, domineering husband (Allen Garfield). It was hilarious seeing the pratfalls of Barbara Harris' Winifred, a mousy blonde wife who desperately seeks to break into the Nashville music business, and who shocks everyone in the end, which I won't dare say much about. The ending of this movie is a jolt out of a fantasy unlike any other I felt happen in a movie; I felt like Altman robbed me of a core emotional part of my being, but then the final song comes on, and it's suddenly makes all the more sense.

The MUSIC in Nashville is out of this world. It is entirely country music, but if you hate country, not to worry. These songs are performed with the utmost of energy, manic or otherwise, and are certifiable earworms worthy of any pop-radio-station. Seriously, if you're not humming "It don't worry me, it don't worry me, you may say 'I ain't free', but it don't worry me..." by the end of the movie, you'd better check your pulse. Altman's shifting soundtrack is part satire, part send-up, part tribute. We register country music has a wide variety of sounds—jingoistic patriotism (“200 Years), chugging “Tennessee-Three”-style romping (“Tapedeck in His Tractor”), Dylanesque acoustic folk (“I’m Easy”)—but, at the end of the day, it returns to the core of music. The feeling of joy and togetherness it brings to people. The simplicity of the message of Keith Carradine’s song, now sung with unbelievable gospel verve by Barbara Haris: “Hey, we may have a lot of shit going for us, but that’s not gonna keep me from trying my hardest to be happy. We have our lot in it together. Let’s keep a-goin’ for all our sakes!” The actors all write and perform their own songs: a feat on its own. In fact, there's actually only one real country-star in the cast: Ronee Blakley, who plays the tortured country muse Barbara Jean. She feels the adoration of all her adoring fans, but inside she's living a silent hell at the hands of her husband who won't let her rest. We never truly get a sense of the problems that plague Barbara Jean, but the harrowing scene in the hospital is enough of an indication that things aren't so rosy when the curtain goes down and the microphones are turned off. Listen closely to her singing "Dues" here and admire the conviction with which she belts out that mean song:

These characters are people we know, people we encounter on a daily basis on a street, and who've got fascinating stories to tell, but we are too self-absorbed to even care about them. Altman dares to make you care. I know I mentioned Tomlin, Blakley, and Harris, but there are so many other dynamite performances in here. The chauffeur, the folk trio on the verge of a breakup, the ridiculed black singer ("the whitest nigger in town! A regular Oreo!" says the chef played by Robert Doqui; Nashville does a tremendous job of making you feel the palpable racial tension in the town, and how little we've come in terms of eradicating racism), the ridiculous white midget country-singer, his neurotic mistress, and Opal. Oh Opal. The busy-body BBC reporter who sticks her nose in the wrong places, whose church on Sundays is a graveyard of buses for her scoop on Nashville in her BBC documentary. The great irony of her missing the big event at the film's end should not be lost on anybody.

There's a particular moment at the end of Nashville where Keith Carradine (the self-absorbed womanizer Tom) sings "I'm Easy" and the camera cuts to Geraldine Chaplin (Opal) looking to Keith. She looks elated, she feels powerfully confident as she realizes that the song may be for her. That one look solidifies the movie for me; it's such a great cut, because in five silent seconds, we know the score. And we feel so much sadness for Opal when she realizes that no, the song's not for her. This is filmmaking at its finest; that shot of Opal's sad face doesn't need to be in there. But because it is, Altman clues us in that this film functions on a much subtler level than we expect of films. We expect American films to dazzle us with taut plots and a tight narrative. Nashville isn't like that. It's panoramic. It seems to break all the rules and puts them all back together. We don't watch Nashville for the stories; moreso for the people, to see true-blue Americans talking with one another, honestly or dishonestly. It is slowly becoming my favorite film the more I watch it; the pain Altman portrays is gritty and realistic, but the optimism he presents is unbridled.

It's a long film, for sure, but it is truly a masterpiece to be beheld. It's for movie lovers and for anybody who's interested in ensemble dramas. Every couple months or so, I watch it again and feel like I'm meeting old friends who haven't changed...but I have. It's almost an entire world condensed into 160 lightning-quick minutes of virtuouso 70s filmmaking unparalleled by any other. And it's, at its core, America. It's America, man. It's all of its ugly contradictions and triumphant moments, its ups and downs, its obsessive celebrity crushes and its missed connections, its affairs, its children, its brothers, its lovers: it's all there, and it's beautiful.

The Birds, The Bees, and the Beatles: Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night" (1964)

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Directed by: Richard Lester

Rating: ★★★★★ (Masterpiece)

screenplay by: Alun Owen

starring: John Lennon (John), Paul McCartney (Paul), George Harrison (George), Ringo Starr (Ringo), Wilfrid Brambell (Grandfather), Victor Spinetti (TV Director), Norman Rossington (Norm), and John Junkin (Shake).

Plot rundown: 48 hours in the lives of the Beatles, who must evade girls, guns, and grandfathers as they prepare for their next gig in a television theatre.

A review of my favorite movie, you say? Why, sure, why not!

What else can one say about a movie that's nearly perfect in all respects? that's a burst of explosive, corrosive energy of the screen? that's a dreamy relic which gives us relief from all the tired pop cliches of my generation and generations after me?

The Beatles' first feature film, directed by British New Wave master Richard Lester, will live on in the annals of film as being that different movie--something that could have easily become sentimental, dated garbage, but which instead became not only a picture-perfect encapsulation of its less-than-perfect times, but also a reaffirmation in everything we believe in: the healing power of music, the philosophy of fandom, our enchantment and desire to break free when we're young before it's too late. I know I still want to, and I'm glad John and Paul and George and Ringo and Grandfather feel the same way, too.

What is the movie about? Not that it rightly matters, because it has no plot. No, just a glance at two days in the lives of the world's best musical collaboration since Nero and The Violin. They run from girls, they ride trains, they quip smarmy one-liners to reporters, they come on stage, they tune their Rickenbackers, they sing, they finish, they ride away, repeat ad nauseum. It sounds pretty tiring, but for the viewer it never is. It is clear that the Beatles are in love with their craft and that they are genuine genius composers, but once in a while, they get bored of the famous life.

That's where the fun of the picture comes in.

George Harrison: inventor of the photo-booth.

For the second half of the film, we see the Beatles running around doing random things. They gallivant about in a field to the tune of "Can't Buy Me Love". John Lennon chats with a woman who mistakes him for John Lennon. George Harrison is a non-conformist rebel who runs in with a clothing designer trying to make the latest buck on whatever the fuck it is the kids are into these days. Paul mills about playing piano and going "Zap" and "Shazam" every once in a while (if anything, Paul's the least defined and doesn't get to do much of anything in the movie). And Ringo? He, ironically enough, is the most interesting Beatle despite being the least creative in terms of songwriting. Hardly anyone who listens to the Beatles for long enough springs up to say Ringo's their favorite Beatle, but when they do, it's because of the riveting performance he gives in A Hard Day's Night as a lonely, slightly nebbish British boy who feels ashamed at not having done anything productive with his life and staying holed up in hotels rather than "living", as Grandfather suggests.

A good transition to say: who is Grandfather? He is the wily Irish old upstart, Paul's charge, who throws nearly all of the Beatles' hijinks into jeopardy. He causes trouble and sweet-talks dames with a distinctly playful Irish accent, playing off the Beatles' youthful yet slightly conformist image with a elderly yet vivacious charm. He is the true rebel of the group, the one that pulls the strings, if you will. "Don't worry, lad! Johnny McCartney will give 'em the old one-two!" he screams to Ringo as he makes a grand "escape" from a jail. Wilfrid Brambell is a delight to see when he's on screen, and provides one of the best supporting performances in any movie I've ever seen, bar none.

Don't mess with Grandpa.

The other supporting players do well, too. Norman Rossington and John Junkin play Norm and Shake, two Abbott-and-Costello-like managers of the Beatles who want the trip to go along as smoothly as possible without any hitches. Norm is impossibly angry at Shake "for always being taller than me, just to SPITE me!" Shake is a sweet individual, sweet to the Beatles, and his demeanor contrasts perfectly with the Napoleonic Norm, whose inflated ego makes him think of himself as the fifth Beatle.

And the milk-and-honey Victor Spinetti is hilarious as the neurotic Stage Manager who runs the Beatles' final show; he walks about with a swagger all to himself, and worries about the Beatles missing their show as a mother hen missing her chicks. He cares more about his own dime-store reputation, not giving a tinker's cuss about the fact that he's filming the fuckin' Beatles. When they return from their escapade across London, he demurely sighs, "You don't know how much this means to me! If you hadn't have come back, it would have meant....the Epilogue, or....news in Welsh....for life."

"I bet his wife knitted that sweater for him."
"I bet she knitted him."

Director Richard Lester keeps all of these forces intact by tightly packing the film into ninety minutes of nonstop action, excitement, and laughs. Lester's contributions to what we now know today as the music video cannot be overstated. In the same year that Godard (Band a Part) and Demy (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) let their cameras run on for long periods of time, focusing the energy on their singing-and-dancing subjects, Lester elects to go in an innovative opposite direction. He cuts up the action, turning our attention to the speed and the rhythm of the montaged shots rather than letting us focus on the subjects for longer than necessary. In his Beatles films, he is an impressionist filmmaker, freely weaving in and out of his main subjects to give us tiny morsels of youthful life, condensing the Beatles's pop-gems to the essence and purity of music. Note, for instance, the opening of the film: something that is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most electrifying opening to a movie ever.
                                   
The distinctly British screenplay is perfectly palatable to American audiences, because the writer--Alun Owen--has allowed the humor to come from the odd mannerisms of the Brits and with jokes that even us slow-minded Americans can comprehend. For instance, when Grandfather talks to Ringo about his nose, he offhandedly insults the drummer by saying "Fans take a dislike to things. They'll pick on a nose...!", to which Ringo replies, "Ah! Pick on your own!" The script is riddled with nifty one-liners that the Beatles deliver with authenticity and style. It is never wooden, and John, George, and Ringo are quite adept with the material (Paul, not so much).

The concert scenes use Godardian jump cuts and dramatic zoom-ins to accentuate the rush of the stage for the audience. That final concert sequence is brilliant, as it encapsulate the early Beatles to a tee. The girls' frenzy is our frenzy. Each girl is a character in herself. The joy that they see in seeing the Beatles rubs off on us. Once in a while, we get a cut to one of the ancillary characters doing something goofy, and in the best visual gag, Grandfather appears on stage during "She Loves You", much to the consternation of the Stage Manager.

A Hard Day's Night is, in my mind, what the perfect film is. Well-defined characters that jump out of the screen into film mythology, a smart script that panders neither to the actors nor to the audience, a revolutionary use of film editing and montage, gorgeously shot black-and-white film that gives the film a timeless quality, and the best movie soundtrack this side of the Mersey River. It is the most unconventional formula--what could have easily been a cash-in on what seemed to be "the fad of the time" now must be accepted as one of the greatest pieces of art ever put to the big screen.

It is necessary to see A Hard Day's Night at least thrice in your life to marvel at the fantastic feats it manages to pull.

We'd like to say "thank you" on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.

"She's a Reeeeeeeal Phony..." - Blake Edwards's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961)

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

Directed by: Blake Edwards

Rating: ★★★★ (Very Good)

written by: George Axelrod; based off of the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote.

Starring: Audrey Hepburn (Holly Golightly), George Peppard (Paul Varjak), Patricia Neal (Mrs. Emily Failenson), Martin Balsam (O.J. Berman), Buddy Ebsen (Doc Golightly), and Mickey Rooney (Mr. Yunioshi).  

Plot run-down: A beastly great rom-com about a young New York socialite (Audrey Hepburn) who becomes interested in a young man (George Peppard) who has moved into her apartment building.

First, a disclaimer: up until today, I have never been a tremendous fan of Breakfast At Tiffany's. I remember hazily seeing it once when I was a freshman in high school at the behest of one of my good friends, Taylor. I had a huge crush on her at the time and I remember being able to gush with her over various vintage-y, retrotastic culture-points that nobody else in our school wanted to. (We shared a love-love relationship with the Beatles; but then again, who doesn't?) If there was one thing I couldn't understand, however,  it was her certifiable obsession with the actress Audrey Hepburn. Back then, I didn't think much of good ol' Audrey. I thought she was pretty (and ten, twenty, thirty times the actress her early-60s contemporary Natalie Wood[en] was), but she was no Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield or even Lauren Bacall. (I still believe that!)

Those eyes....they say one glance of her eyes is enough to set mortal men to stone. ('Cept Bogie, of course.)

Through my friendship with Taylor, one name kept popping up over and over again: Holly Golightly. "What a queer name," I thought. "Golightly? Sounds like the name of one of the girls in a PG-13 James Bond flick." She talked about Holly incessantly. She knew the screenplay to the tee. She told me of days when she was experiencing the "mean reds." The mean what, I questioned. [Cue perfectly-delivered Hepburnesque monologue about the "mean reds" being "the feeling you get when you're afraid of something but you don't know what it is you're afraid of" and how they're distinct from the "mean blues."] There was something fabulous about Taylor; how big she dreamed, how wide-eyed she got when she talked to me. Sometimes I could hear the voice of Holly Golightly run right through her...and I hadn't even seen the movie yet.

Still, whatever Taylor recommended, I pursued with all my heart's content. I promised her I'd watch it licketysplit and see what I thought. (This was back in the day when I thought the AFI 100 Best Movies list was worth a damn. I saw it was in the top 20 and my heart jumped with joy. Huzzah, it'll be a great film, and I can gushgushgush about it with Tay-lor....) I Googled the name "Holly Golightly" and Breakfast at Tiffany's immediately come up. It was a movie that had Patricia Neal (a name I was sorta familiar with), Mickey Rooney (hey! the guy from Night at the Museum!), and was directed by Blake Edwards (who?). In any case, I checked it out immediately from my local library in Phoenix and popped it into the DVD player the first chance I got.

I remember watching it and....jeez, this movie is really long. And quite racist. And this girl isn't funny in the slightest. In fact, she isn't kooky in the good Diane Keaton way! She's just....rich.

When it finished, I didn't feel like it spoke to me in any capacity. It was just an empty movie that just so happened to have Audrey Hepburn in it. I didn't speak of it to Taylor the next day; I just said, "I see what you mean when you say you're Holly Golightly." (Of course, being the semi-cultured youngster that I was, I didn't have an inkling of an idea of how the hell Taylor was like Audrey Hepburn. I didn't even see Holly Golightly, I simply saw the lady who played the Cockney flower-girl in My Fair Lady.)

Fabulous.

Flash-forward to May 10th, 2015. I'm sitting at CoHo (Coffee House; Cardinals love their initials) in sunny Northern California, trying to juggle writing a short-story for class, writing a French composition about a tradition my family does (plot twist: there aren't a great deal of them besides the obligatory Christmas celebration), and reading another short story about a murderer who can't tell the difference between a slaughtered sheep and his young female victims (seriously; it's called "Sheep" by Thomas McNeely, check it out sometime). I finish the composition and suddenly realize I don't have anything pressing due until much later in the week...so fuck it, I treat myself to a movie. I comb through Netflix and, lo and behold, Breakfast at Tiffany's comes up. Now I haven't seen it in a very long time, but I'm keener to return to it because of the director this time, not the star. I've been revisiting some of Blake Edwards's material for the past month or so, and am slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that he is one of the most underrated American comedic directors of his time. Everybody knows him from his legendary work with Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther movies (A Shot in the Dark [1964] and The Pink Panther Strikes Again [1976] will have your sides bursting with laughter), but almost nobody talks about him beyond that. Well, I revisited his 1965 comedy road epic The Great Race (starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood) and found it mind-numbingly hilarious. It is inspired lunacy of the greatest kind, featuring menage-a-quatres & randy polar bears & mad suffragettes & an around-the-world-in-40-days race from New York to Paris. It's all made magical by the direction of Blake Edwards, whose influences range from Charlie Chaplin to Jacques Tati and everyone in between. (In a later review, I'll go in detail over the positives and negatives of an interesting, if somewhat bloated, film like The Great Race.) 

Jack Lemmon in Blake Edwards's "The Great Race" (1965)

WARNING: Don't try this at home, kids.

Naturally, I'm in the process of exploring Edwards, and it's with that background that (with the encouragement of my friend Laura, who digs these classics as well) I decided to revisit the "hellish plasticities" of Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

And you know what happened? The more I thought about it, the more I realized how wrong I was about Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's a goshdanged humdinger of a rom-com with a sardonic edge.

The biggest mystery of the movie is how Audrey Hepburn has such perfect goddamn morning hair all the time!

In three words: sumptuous, cosmopolitan, and complicated.

If we think about it, there isn't very much plot to the movie. It essentially revolves around the efforts of a young, Salingeresque writer named Paul (played by George Peppard) to convince Hepburn's Holly Golightly that love is not found in dollar bills or in social markers of success. Love, in fact, is right in front of her. Probably the most pressing thing that occurs in the film is a bungled arrest of Holly, who has unknowingly been relaying secret codes on the behalf of a gangster who's behind bars in Sing Sing. But even this big moment of narrative tension is relieved at the first instance by Blake Edwards. We are more focused with how the arrest affects Holly and Paul's relationship than with the implication that oh shit, she can go to jail for aiding a known criminal. Hell, it's very evident that Holly doesn't particularly care about any societal ramifications: she's willing to jump bail and risk going back to prison in order to go on holiday in Brazil. Why? 'Cause she feels like it. 

Truman Capote famously railed against the movie for two reasons: one, he didn't think Audrey Hepburn was particularly capable of bringing the character of Holly Golightly to life. He thought only Marilyn Monroe could bring the part to fruition. (Unfortunately for Truman, and perhaps fortunately for us, Marilyn was too busy filming John Huston's The Misfits at the time to take on a big role such as Holly Golightly, so the producers contacted the next best thing: Miss Hepburn.) 

Dammit world, this is what we could have had!

Two, he felt that the finished product was "saccharine", that it was corrupted by the sickly sweet platitudes of Hollywood conventional romances, and that his story of Holly the tsk-tsk-tsk-gal-lost-in-the-maze-of-the-city becomes one of a free-spirited ingenue who drifts from town to town. These are natural complaints for a writer as talented and as committed to the worlds he draws as Mr. Capote, but he forgot one key ingredient: this is the movies. They function on their own specific logic, and if there's anything that I've learned by watching movies for the brief amount of time I have, it's that you mustn't judge what you see in front of you on a first kneejerk reaction. Often, you have to ask yourself what the circumstances, chain-of-events, and stepping-stones that led to the ending you see before you. Often, people ONLY remember the ending and don't try to connect it with the film that they've seen unfold. And it becomes incredibly easy for a Hollywood picture, especially, to be taken apart because the endings are often so saccharinely banal. But think of it this way: the real magic of the film occurs before the ending. The actual ending can be changed and distorted at the whim of a merciless producer or an idiotic screenwriter. But the middle of the movie? Why, that's the director's baby. And, boy, does Blake Edwards have great ideas for who and what Holly Golightly represents.

"Blake, darling, be a dear and get me my cigarette-holder, will you? I haven't had nicotine in my body in five bloody hours and I need it now."

Contrary to popular perception, Holly Golightly is not the member of the nouveau riche that her elegant little black Chanel dress and Roosevelt-style cigarette holder indicate on the movie poster. I was frankly shocked that Audrey Hepburn--whose Holly Golightly is an iconic symbol of elegance and stateliness and haute couture in fashionista and bourgeoista social-circles everywhere today, whose rich air graces the canvases of many a $20 college-dorm-room poster--is actually a wanna-be socialite, a working-class girl who's had to work hard to get rid of that Midwestern hick accent of hers. She is fractured, wanted only for her body, unwanted for her soul. She doesn't fall into any neat category. She doesn't know what she wants to be; she's just sort of drifting along, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. The people around her judge her harshly; a movie exec (Martin Balsam) pegs her as a "real phony...a GREAT kid, but a phony." A suave Brazillian aristocrat in line to be the next President of the Sugar-Cane Country says she's "dangerous for any man's image." And our secondary protagonist? The guy we're supposed to root for. He says that she's "a coward" and that "she's got no guts." 

All three of these guys, however, are wrong. The truth of the matter is that they've never met anybody like Holly Golightly before. She's tres moderne: we see she's strongly determined to escape her past and forge a new city identity for herself. That must be hell for anybody who comes from the country and who's been told she's beneath everybody. Before she was Holly, she was Luella Mae: a generic hick-girl who was expected to fritter her life away in the farms, raising chickens, breeding cows, and birthing children she was out of her element to birth. Director Blake Edwards doesn't show us the steps that she took to become Holly Golightly (that's another movie in and of itself), but from what we learn from her husband Doc, we can surmise that the person she is today is a significantly-different, hardly-fought, furiously-updated version of Luella Mae. It's cliched to say this, but she's definitely a new woman. That the men in the picture can't understand Holly doesn't speak to any chauvinism or genuine bemusement on the part of Blake Edwards. It just speak to his ability to (very obliquely and very intelligently) say how America's men will always be playing a game of perpetual catch-up to strong and enrapturing women like Holly Golightly. 

Sure, she loves Paul the writer, but he's not made of particularly strong stuff; he's a writer, an artist whose chances of immediate success are few and far-between. Holly Golightly  isn't a player so much as a survivor; she knows what poverty is, and she doesn't want to fall into that state of disrepair again. There comes a time in everybody's lives where we come to a curious crossroads--whether that be the first year of college, the night of one's marriage, or the dissolution of a conjugal relationship--and we feel dissatisfied with the persona that we drag along with us. We slowly but surely want to reinvent ourselves; we want to be a better person than what we were in the past. The problem is we're too afraid to let those old personalities go, their memories still linger on in our souls. This is exactly the type of existential crisis Holly faces throughout the movie, as various people come back from her past (her husband) and her present (Paul) to tell her what she can and cannot be.

But she doesn't have to listen to any of them.

She constantly forges her own destiny. She learns through the faults and mistakes of others. That the ending of Breakfast at Tiffany's acquiesces to the logic of the rom-com isn't a cop-out or a disintegration of Audrey Hepburn's profoundly-drawn character Holly. Rather, it bolsters Holly; she decides, like she's done throughout her whole life, to defy people's expectations and become somebod. In the film's ending, she's no longer the lonely, "phony" drifter Holly Golightly. She tries a new experiment: fidelity with one guy. She's clearly in love with Paul, and they make a swell team, and her search for an identity finally leads her to a (momentary) period in her life where she will be a taken woman. It's not an outright moment of feminism, but it's not a moment of total misogyny and female subversion as is typical of other lesser Hollywood movies of this time. All throughout her life, Holly's been a drifter, unaware of where she should go or who she is. She goes against the grain of what people say to her. She's had money dictate the paths her life takes. But in Edwards's beautiful ending--complete with obligatory rainstorms, melodrama, and reunions with "anominous" cats--Holly proves she's got what it takes to once again DEFY WHAT ANYONE THINKS OF HER and go into a new stage of her life, feet first. How that stage will work out for her, we can only guess. Blake Edwards, Audrey Hepburn, and George Axelrod (the screenwriter) don't have the answers. 

But here's the real question: WHAT HAPPENS TO CAT?!? I must know, Blake Edwards, I must know!!!

But we can accept Holly as a character more than the sum of her parts. I was admittedly tempted to chide the movie for a pretty empty and cliched ending. But the more I think about it, the more I think of how well the nuances of Holly Golightly converge into one fine point at film's end. The character gloriously pays off, and it rewards Edwards's meandering, patient, and cosmopolitan direction. Is there any greater proof of this finely crafted line between elegance and emptiness than in the famous guitar performance of "Moon River" by Audrey? Watch it twice. Notice Edwards's clever demolishing of the artist's hang-up to capture everything he sees around him in a permanent form. (The camera lingers on a typed, diet-Salinger sentence in Paul's typewriter about the author meeting "the girl with the nameless cat".) Notice how he immediately compliments this observation with a beautiful human moment of imperfection: Audrey is in cleaning-clothes, dirty jeans, and at one point, her voice cracks as she lamely strums simple chords on her guitar. She doesn't sing "Moon River"; she croaks it, she pleas with nobody in particular. Can words fully capture something as delicate and as powerful as this? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Can movies? Perhaps...

Little known fact: those are actually Eric Clapton's hands playing the guitar.

Sorry, Taylor, that it took me 5 years to recognize the genius of Breakfast at Tiffany's that you already knew in its rawest, purest form.

(One star off, of course, for the idiotic and repulsive Asian stereotype that Mickey "Yunioshi" Rooney half-asses. The yellowface is unconvincing, but I tried not to harshly judge the movie based on this. Yes, it's unnecessary and unfunny, but Blake Edwards was genuinely remorseful later in his life for including the character in the first place, saying he would gladly cut his own movie today if only to excise that unfortunate character. And, mercifully, it's only a tangential aspect of the otherwise rich film.)

Ah, 1961. When being politically correct amounted to dressing up Mickey Rooney in inept buck teeth.

Carlos: An Introduction!

Well, hello!

Allow myself to introduce....myself?

(No, wait...that's not right.) Alself me to introlow my...

(One sec.)

pop! screeeeeeee-

(Ah, there we go.)



ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF!

There, that's better. My name's Carlos. I'm currently 18. I'm from Los Angeles, CA, but I've been around a lot, spending a spell in Phoenix and currently residing in good ol' Pasadena, where the little old lady lives. I'm the son of Honduran immigrants (God love 'em) and am superbly blessed to have gotten into my dream-school, Stanford University. (Making my parents proud day-by-day; love ya, Mamita.) This is my blog.

(It'll come out slowly but surely that I'm a rather cheerful sort. I figure one must always look towards the silver linings in life, even during moments of great distress and emotional turmoil.)

It's about time I've started my own official blog. I've been keeping an informal movie blog on Letterboxd (the Facebook for cinephiles) for the past year or so, but I'll be maintaining this blog to parlay about other things in my life: school, music, books, the state-of-things-as-they-currently-are, maybe some poetry or short-stories I've had swirling in my mind. But the main thrust of this blog is, of course, movies.  I've had a hankering for going to the movies since I was a little kid. I've grown a lot from simply watching them unfold, and I take a perverse pleasure in watching movies. There are days when I consider it downright unhealthy, sure, but at the end of the week, I look back and find I'm that more enriched by what the cinema can offer each and every one of us. They offer us glimpses into worlds we otherwise couldn't possibly begin to imagine--a conjugal French bourgeois family, the hardships of a Senegalese village, the life of an optimistic Eskimo roughin' it in an Arctic Tundra.

"Don't look at me like I'm crazy. All will be explained soon enough..." --An Eskimo.
(Source: DVDBeaver.com)

To paraphrase an epiphany I had after watching the rom-com-drama masterpiece that is Billy Wilder's The Apartment, each movie is just a little square in an ever-expanding quilt that make up who each of us are. They are binoculars that see beyond our seemingly ennui-filled boringness and help us realize the richness, the holiness in every singular moment of our lives. However, the movies help us make sense of our world just a tiny relative bit. To really be present in every moment, we must talk with others, we must love, we must accept the totality of death, we must engage the social sciences and the natural sciences and spirituality. Do the movies have all the answers? Certainly not. But they do point us in the right direction.

One of the main goals in my blog is to direct people to new discoveries, revisit old classics, and talk about why the movies are so gosh-darned important in our present lives. We have to see why movies are worth studying. Not just watching, mind you!; that implies you're taking up a passive role and simply letting the movie happen to you. No, I'm talking about seriously analyzing what it is that makes a movie great, what makes another not-so-great, and what it is about the cinema that's appealing. When you find the right one, you're left mesmerized. It's a rich pleasure to experience a movie that affects you, that grabs you by the lapels and shakes your soul out of you, putting it on display before you as its closing credits solemnly roll by. It's positively life-changing if you know what you're looking for.

But, bah! Enough jibber-jabber. On to the scrivvy writty!