Adam's Favorite Movies

[Adam]

Because I know you're all very interested

I'm going to try not to make this lame, but easier said than done I guess. It's not going to be in any sort of order, either, because I'm never happy with the lists I make. Just going to do little write-ups of random favorites, whatever I feel like writing about at the time. And I'll pick stuff I don't see on a lot of other folk's lists, as a change of pace

Let the self indulgence begin

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS
MODERN ROMANCE
KING OF HEARTS
THE PASSENGER
SHALLOW GRAVE
FLOATING CLOUDS
DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY
LAST NIGHT
PORTRAIT OF JENNIE

[Adam]

Pineapple Express
David Gordon Green - 2008

Okay, so Pineapple Express pretty much had me about from three minutes in when Bill Hader starts pantomiming a blowjob and then lets loose one of the most devastating "Fuck you"s I've ever heard. And it's not just because of Hader's brilliant delivery. On the one hand, this moment feels so like any other chunk of Apatowian humor that pervaded seemingly every big-time comedy in the aughts. But then you notice how subtly active the camera is as it smoothly moves in for a close-up on Hader and there's just a sense that this is something totally different. There's a level of artistry and nuance and warmness and playfulness going on here that feels so fresh and disarming and it never lets up the whole way through. Purely entertaining as all get-out, in the shouty moments just as much as in the quiet ones

It's all because of David Gordon Green. David Gordon Green has the touch. It would be so interesting if guys like him directed movies like this more often. Look at Eastbound and Down for the easiest dichotomal example. The Gordon Green helmed episodes of Eastbound are darkly comic masterpieces on par with the UK Office at the height of its back-breaking cringiness. The Jody Hill/Adam McKay episodes, meanwhile, can't help but fall flat by comparison because they're so dang conventional, despite the wonderful writing/performances. And it's the same deal with Pineapple Express. Pineapple Express is everything that's great about Knocked Up or Anchorman, except it's handled with ten times the craft and care and talent

That said, impressively, this would almost definitely still be a fairly dynamite ride even if it was removed from the filter of Gordon Green. Not one of the actors hits a note that rings false and you get the sense this was already an affable enough, offbeat Midnight Run riff on the page before all the improvised material was introduced. Such a loose tone to it and it's reminiscent of many of my favorite '80s, Into the Night-ish movies in that you can never quite get a handle on where it's going. It's a testament to the film's ramshackle charm that even when things get absurdly, awkwardly violent towards the end, it never once feels like a buzzkill

Speaking of buzzkills, this is a personal list, so let me get a little boring and personal. A big whopping factor in this film being wrote up here is because of the time I came to it in my life. Intelligently stupid movies like this, even when they're directed by hipster-approved icons like David Gordon Green, aren't usually the first thing you'd think of when trying to come up with especially impressionable films for yourself. It seems silly to write how important this dumb movie is to me and I don't even have a great story to back it up. All it is, is that I went and saw Pineapple Express with someone I really cared about at a midnight screening the week before I left for college. Last summer of my adolescence, essentially. We were very high and so was everyone else in the very packed house and it remains my favorite movie-going experience, ever. So I feel like I owe it for that. I also feel like this movie was made for me

And it all leads to that final scene, which is so tender and delicate and lovely. The closest approximation of a couple of potheads shooting the shit I've seen a major motion picture nail. The fact that they're twinklingly reminiscing about car chases and gunfights instead of parties or tv watching or whatnot is beside the point. This scene is played so chillingly accurate it hurts. It's an observed and beautiful ode to everyone who gets it, just like the rest of the film. And like I say, on a personal level, I already recognize that this was a formative experience in my life and I'm just a little over a year removed from it, so chances are I'm only gonna look back at Pineapple Express more fondly as the years drag on

[Boner M]

And it all leads to that final scene, which is so tender and delicate and lovely. The closest approximation of a couple of potheads shooting the shit I've seen a major motion picture nail. The fact that they're twinklingly reminiscing about car chases and gunfights instead of parties or tv watching or whatnot is beside the point. This scene is played so chillingly accurate it hurts. It's an observed and beautiful ode to everyone who gets it, just like the rest of the film. And like I say, on a personal level, I already recognize that this was a formative experience in my life and I'm just a little over a year removed from it, so chances are I'm only gonna look back at Pineapple Express more fondly as the years drag on

Solid paragraph. Lookin' forward to the rest of the list!

[Adam]

Modern Romance
Albert Brooks - 1981

Okay, let me ask you something... If a person's not home, and you start driving around their house, and you drive around and around and around and you start driving around the city and you're going ninety miles an hour and you're calling them every four seconds and you don't think of anything else, what is that?

Is that not love?

I think I try to paint myself as this hopeless romantic sometimes, when the truth is I'm so much closer to the semi-deranged, neurotic id that is Albert Brooks in this movie. I see the worst of myself in Modern Romance's quixotic, self-absorbed, overly possessive antihero. This is a man who calls old girlfriends on a jealous whim after taking too many quaaludes and goes on painfully awkward dates with them. He's self aware in a way, but he can never get out of his head long enough to see the forest for the trees because he's terminally bogged down in what he convinces himself to be true love

Brooks plays Robert Cole like he plays all his surrogates, making slight tweaks to serve darker subject matter than usual. The object of his affection is played by Kathryn Harrold and if it were up to her, their relationship would probably have been legitimately over well before the point where we catch up to it in the movie. But Cole has this perverse way of breaking down her defenses with flopsweat and they seem like they're destined to perform this sad dance of breaking up and getting back together until they die or at least until she grows some balls. When the movie's over, we leave the relationship on the same note we started with and it all makes you laugh, even if you should be cringing

To lighten things up, the film takes a couple of detours to riff on some of the less destructive character faults of the Albert Brooks archetype. The scene where Super Dave (Brooks' real life brother) takes advantage of Cole's insecurities in a sporting goods store is a classic. And almost as an added bonus, there's a subplot woven in revolving around the editing of a b-grade science fiction movie starring George Kennedy. There's nearly enough material there to make up a decent satire of Hollywood, but in the end it exists to illustrate how Cole's obsessive behavior has bled into every other part of his life

If Albert Brooks is the Left Coast's answer to Woody Allen, then I guess you could call Modern Romance his depressing spin on Annie Hall. The fact is, though, that's a supreme disservice to this movie as there's a lot more agonizing truth here and a lot less whining. This is Brooks' magnum opus because it never sacrifices that truth or its unrelenting bleakness for the sake of laughs and it gets them anyway. It's a movie about clinging onto those you no longer really love because you can't bear the thought of seeing them find happiness with someone else. It's an almighty condemnation of the romantically selfish as much as it is a bizarre tribute to them and it's also the greatest romantic comedy I've ever seen

[Melville]

It's not going to be in any sort of order, either, because I'm never happy with the lists I make. Just going to do little write-ups of random favorites, whatever I feel like writing about at the time.

This seems like by far the most practical approach to such a thread.

Great reviews thus far.

[B-side]

I'll be watching.

[Adam]

Shallow Grave
Danny Boyle - 1994

Oh yes, I believe in friends. I believe we need them. But if one day you find that you just can't trust them anymore... well, what then? What then?

Absolutely required viewing for any new roommates; Shallow Grave documents the disintegration of a friendship between three snarky yuppies as they try to figure out how to handle the package deal of a corpse(s) and a suitcase full of money that finds its way into their fab Edinburgh flat. Things start out merrily enough, but it all devolves pretty quickly into the realm of strange vibrations, mistrust, paranoia, murder and dismemberment. And then there's the ending - an easy candidate for the most satisfying in probably the past twenty years of film. You might see all the twists coming from a mile away, but the final couple of punchlines are still very much worth it

When Shallow Grave came out, it was immediately tagged as Hitchcock for the hip, techno-listening Gen X set. This is maybe one of the only movies where you can say that sorta thing and not mean it as a total, flippant dismissal. The Hitch wannabes have made some snazzy looking pictures over the years, but the things they never seem to lock down are a) the sense of humor and b) the intelligence. Shallow Grave does it right, though, and you won't find many more modern thrillers that so nail such a rare brew of biting drollery, grisly horror and casual cool. It's the kind of thing where you've seen the bare bones story told before, yet seldomly this well

It's also a dark as fuck character study of a few very specific types operating under a unique brand of tension. A damning social statement about the level of morality that exists amongst affluent young adults once they get within even a whiff of a little bit of money. The film more or less comes out and openly demands you take a moment and think about what you would do if put in the place of Ewan McGregor's prickish, dreaming journalist, Kerry Fox's smug, aloof doctor or Chris Eccleston's awkward, squirrelly accountant. Once things begin getting progressively more gruesome, the idea is that you see yourself in the characters and try to come to terms with the unfortunate choices they make. None of them are particularly likable people, but they still become pretty sympathetic figures when their backs are up against the wall

So yes, it's all very smart and morbid and flashy and weird, but the real key with Shallow Grave, I think, is how much of a flat-out delight it is. For a film with such obnoxious and despicable characters and moments of such abject revulsion, it's also wildly hilarious and breezily paced. Boyle's always had the visual flair and the kinetic enthusiasm, but the thing is I don't know if he'll ever get back the pitch-perfect performances, the delicious snideness or just the pure, diabolical wit Shallow Grave boasts

[Adam]

Floating Clouds
Mikio Naruse - 1955

Floating Clouds opens with Japanese repatriate Yukiko Koda, played by the wonderful Hideko Takamine, returning to the country she ran away from years before. She doesn't really have anywhere to go, so she turns to Tomioka (Masayuki Mori), a former colleague in Indochina whom she had an affair with during the war. He had promised to leave his wife for her, but he doesn't. Yukiko is only slightly deterred by this. She has built up a great love in her mind and she spends many years trying to convince Tomioka to give himself to her. Even after Tomioka's wife dies, he still can't commit to Yukiko, but by this point she has fully deluded herself into thinking her obsession and devotion will have a happy ending. Despite her love, though, Tomioka always remains distant. He deceives her, he carries on with younger women and just in general he gives her the total high hat while she endures all manner of horrible shit. Maybe he loves her in the only way he can love someone, maybe he doesn't love anything anymore or maybe he never loved her in the first place? We kind of get the answer to this in the bummer of an ending, though by then it's too late. Whatever the case, Yukiko doesn't want to let go of her love. She gradually loses her naiveté and innocence, but through everything, no matter how bitter she gets, Tomioka remains all she has to hold on to. She can't move on and it's that heartbreaking spirit that ruins her

I have watched two Naruse/Takamine pairings. They are a match made in celluloid heaven. Takamine is one of the most adept actors I've ever seen at communicating things without speaking so she's served well by Naruse's subtle, almost indistinct style. There's a certain intoxicating lyricism to the sustained sequences of Yukiko and Tomioka ambling up and down roads and side roads, but those scenes are so enchanting precisely because Naruse never calls attention to his tricks. The director had an easy mastery of how to tell this type of story. Floating Clouds is about a tragic and decidedly unrequited love and Naruse most deftly shapes that heartache through reminiscences and graceful flashbacks to a past life when his two stars were together

The transitions between ripe and sunny wartime Indochina and soul-crushing post-war Japan are drastic and jarring (though smoothly edited). It's immediately clear that those crazy kids who fucked around in Dalat are worlds apart from the very different individuals who meet again in Tokyo. Tomioka has been broken by a war he didn't even fight in. He actually makes several references to their time in Indochina being like a "dream" and that's not meant wholly in the figurative sense. As we go through this life, each past chapter and each past love gets cast aside for a new one. Things get hazy and confusing and we often project/invent thing that weren't even there to begin with. Yukiko is longing for happiness with a man she has forced herself to love and she's blinded herself to all his outward stoicism, lies and affairs. She's been hurt before. She tries not to consider the thought that she idealized their time in Indochina to protect herself from pain. But when people desperately try to cling to those bygone times, all that happens is their present and future becomes fractured. These fleeting memories and feelings and hopes and loves and dreams are ultimately doomed to float from us like clouds out through the ether of time and sometimes we just have to reconcile ourselves with the idea that the past's in the past and that's that