30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #1

The Evil Dead/ Evil Dead II/ Army of Darkness

      Okay, okay.  Yes, I know I sort of cheated again.  Hey, at least they're all of the same series, right?  At least I didn't include the remake.  I have to include all three of the films as I saw them all around the same time, and I love them all.  They're all very different from each other, but at the same time hold on to some connecting ideas.  Never mind that the beginnings of the second and third films retcon the ends of the last ones a bit.  I'll explain that later.

   I even own a brick from the fireplace of the original Evil Dead cabin, which I visited the remains of in Morristown, TN ten years ago.  (I do not recommend going to find it.  It's hard to find and it's on private property way back in the woods.  As of 10 years ago, all that was left was part of the fireplace, the cabin having been burned down in the 1980s.)  But here's a picture of my brick.

     Let's start with a bit of history, as usual.  The Evil Dead was filmed in Tennessee in 1979 by a young 20 year old novice filmmaker named Sam Raimi.  It starred some green actors, noticeably Sam Raimi's childhood friend Bruce Campbell, who had acted in his amateur films before this.  The film was financed by showing a short they had filmed with the same subject matter called Within The Woods.  The film's plot is simple.  Five friends travel up to a secluded cabin in the mountains.  They find odd artifacts in the cellar, including a tape recorder, a strange dagger, and a book bound in human flesh.  They decide to play the tape recorder, which spouts out some ancient passages from the book.  This raises the evil in the woods that sequentially possesses the friends and turns them into evil killing machines.  Much gore and chaos ensues.  The film was not a pleasant one to make.  They used old fashioned thick hard contacts painted white for the possessed, which were painful to wear and could only be left in for 15 minutes at a time.  They had medical mishaps when the nearest hospital was miles away and there were no telephones out there.  The fog machines they used were putting out oil-based fog, which is toxic.  The actors had to throw themselves forcefully against walls and doorknobs and bookshelves over and over again.  Still, things got done eventually.  It took a few years to get all the shots, the music, the editing (done by a then unknown Joel Coen) done.  It was finally released in 1981 independently city to city very slowly.  It got good critical reviews, but was not a box office success, making a little less than 2 million dollars.  Siskel and Ebert didn't like it because it was a gore film, as they crusaded against these films in the 1980s.

    Evil Dead II came about purely because the film Sam Raimi made after The Evil Dead, called Crimewave was a critical and box office failure.  Everyone hated it, even Raimi and Campbell.  Normally back then this would cost new film-makers their careers, but Dino De Laurentiis, a popular producer back in the 1980s, was pressured by none other than Stephen King to finance Evil Dead II.  King had given the first movie a glowing review, which had propelled its fortunes.  Dino decided to help, and the movie started filming in a junior high school gymnasium in Wadesboro, North Carolina and the surrounding woods.  The filming of this movie went easier than the first due to a larger budget, having an actual production company, working with KNB Effects Group for makeup, and having better actors.  The film also has a markedly slapstick tone mixed in with its horror and gore effects, which has become known as "splatstick".  The movie is a remake/sequel, with the first few minutes of the movie rapidly redoing the first film, but with only 2 people, and the rest of the movie having new stuff.  The movie made 5 million in theaters in 1987 and was a critical success.  Even Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars in his newspaper review.  However, on Siskel and Ebert At The Movies, Siskel didn't like the film, and Ebert backtracked his like for the film a bit.  Sorry, couldn't find the clip for this one, though it used to be on youtube.

    Army of Darkness was the only film in the series to be studio-backed.  Universal gave Raimi a small $13 million budget to do this film, due to the success of Darkman two years earlier.  The film was again partially financed by Dino De Laurentiis.  However, in post-production, the studio took over quite a bit, after Dino had given Raimi carte blanche to make the film he wanted.  They forced him to change the downbeat ending to a more positive one, and to add some backstory to the beginning of the film.  So we see a retconned ending of Evil Dead II, with yet another actress playing Linda (Bridget Fonda here), but it ends the same way the second movie did; Ash being caught in a portal and landing (literally) in the middle ages to again fight the deadites.  The film is almost completely a comedy/adventure film this time, with very little horror in it. The movie didn't do that well in the box office and didn't get as good reviews as the first two did.  Still, it's become a cult classic close to as much as the other two, partially due to airings on the Sci-Fi Channel in the 1990s, which is how I first saw part of the film, though I didn't know what it was at the time. Again, Siskel and Ebert (especially cynical Siskel) didn't really care for it.

    I first saw the last 20 minutes of Army of Darkness at my aunt's when I was probably 11 or 12.  I thought it was great, but didn't know what the film was.  I wouldn't find out for a few years.  I got really into horror films when I was around 15 and was allowed to watch R rated films.  I didn't yet know of this series, but found out about the first film by what I call going down the rabbit hole.  This is similar to what happens on Wikipedia now, where you start looking up something, then hours later due to clicking different blue links to related topics, you're suddenly looking at something totally unrelated to your original search.  Well, what I was looking up wasn't unrelated, but Dario Argento films aren't really like Evil Dead...  Evil Dead has more in common with Lucio Fulci.  After reading about the film's plot, I thought it sounded great.  Most horror films don't live up to my expectations...  This one did.  Boy did it ever.  It surpassed my expectation by a mile.  I had never seen, and really haven't since seen a film this off-the-wall, no-holds-barred assault on the senses.  It starts slow... almost boring.  The acting is high-school level cheese.  But then the possessions start.  The blood starts flowing, people get thrown all over the place, things jump out from everywhere, there's a great amount of suspense due to the amount of jump scares, the camera is constantly moving in odd ways... a woman gets raped by a tree! It's what I'd been waiting to see for years!  (Well, minus the crap acting and the tree part.)   I cannot tell you how many times I watched the first movie the first year after I saw it the first time.  It must have been at least once every two weeks.  I wasn't only enjoying the movie every time I watched it, I was studying it.  Finally the type of film I wanted to  make I was seeing on screen!  This was what I wanted to do with my life.

     Not long after I first saw the first film, I borrowed a VHS copy of Evil Dead II.  Holy cow!  This one's great too.  It has the same plot, but it's totally different!  I must admit, though I liked Evil Dead II, it didn't have the same massive effect that the first film did.  It's not as brutal.  It's a Looney Tunes cartoon brought to life and slapped together with Evil Dead.  There's a disembodied hand that causes all sorts of hijinks, there's a guy with a shotgun to replace his aforementioned hand, there's dancing headless corpses, laughing moose heads and lamps... Now that is awesome, but it's not scary.  There's better effects work on this film, mostly due to KNB Effects Group and the bigger budget, but there's less real gore here.  They decided to go for odd colored gore here instead of the more believable dark red blood of the first film.  Here we get bright red blood and different colored splashes of other liquids.  The acting has improved, however.  The film is considered more of a classic than the first movie, these days, but I can't agree.  I consider it to be an equal.  They both were highly original and great low-budget films done right.

    By the time I'd seen the second film, I knew that Army of Darkness was what I had seen part of on the Sci-Fi channel years earlier.  I was looking forward to seeing the whole thing.  Again, I loved it.  It's not as original or as cutting-edge as the first two and it's not scary in any way, but it's a whole lot of fun and really funny to boot.  The acting is at about the same level as Evil Dead II.  That is to say, it's servicable, but it's not great.  There's little gore in this film.  It was the first film to actually be rated, being rated R.  It was originally given an X rating for some reason, which makes no sense to me.  I've seen the "bootleg edition" which has all the deleted stuff put back in, and there's nothing that would remotely cause an X rating.  However, this was 1992, and the MPAA were horrible back then.  Heck, this film would be rated PG-13 today, and only due to fantasy violence and language.  There's scarier more violent stuff in Harry Potter.  No, this film is purely for fun.  One thing that drew me to this film was that it was partially a celebration of stop-motion animation, which as I've stated before, I love.  There's lots of skeletons brought to life in this film to storm a castle and retrieve the Book of The Dead from Ash.  And the skeletons are funny as hell.

And unlike many people, I prefer the ending of the theatrical version instead of the ending shown in Europe.  

   It's more fun that way.

    So ends my list, folks.  Here we have the three films that did the most to form the person I am today.  I own all three films in quite a few different versions/forms.  Bruce Campbell is my hero, and is quite possibly the best example of the everyday man thrown into the unexpected situation.  He's stupid at times, he doesn't want to save everyone, he can be a jerk, but he has to deal get out alive. Sam Raimi got me making amateur short films with friends in my teenage years, which was a lot of fun and I wish I could still do that.  I loved to copy his innovative camera rigs and movements which sadly I could find no clips of.  Putting a camera on a 2x4 board and holding the board by two strings to give it a gliding movement, and get the camera to go pretty much anywhere including close to the ground is something I find genius.  If you want to learn to make a low budget film, listen to any commentary done by Raimi or Campbell on The Evil Dead.  Or read If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell to find out the recipe they used for fake blood and some of the effects on the film.  I've found these films to be a great help to me.  They made me find myself.  They're more popular now due to DVD than when I first saw them, but they're still just as special to me.  If you're one of the few that haven't seen these films, do so immediately.  There's no excuse.

I hope you folks have enjoyed this list, and I'm sorry for all the Facebook and Twitter advertisements for them.  I hope the list has been informative, and gotten you to know me better.  More lists will come eventually, along with one-offs and reviews.  So stay tuned!

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #2

Almost Famous

     Okay, so originally I had this as #1 on my list, but after thinking a bit longer, what was formerly #2 moved up to #1, and so this one moved down a rung.  I just thought I should explain that first.  

     Cameron Crowe, the director and writer of this film, used to be a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine.  He graduated high school at 16, due to skipping kindergarten and two grades of elementary school.  He started writing to Lester Bangs, who had just joined Creem Magazine and also wrote for Rolling Stone.  Bangs was considered a legendary music reviewer at the time and was a leader on getting punk music recognized in the 1970s.  After starting a writing relationship with Bangs, Crowe also started writing reviews for Creem.  He happened to meet Ben Fong-Torres, who was Rolling Stone's senior editor, and was then hired to write for the magazine.  He traveled with the Allman Brothers Band on a tour, interviewing them and the crew, and was a bit of an outsider from the rest of the Rolling Stone writers.  He was more like a fan than a critic.  He loved being around the musicians and watching them do what they did.  Unlike Lester Bangs, who hated progressive rock and heavy metal, Cameron Crowe tended to embrace all forms of rock music.  He even ended up marrying one of the two sisters that formed the core of the band Heart. After this, he got a successful career in film, starting with writing Fast Times At Ridgemont High, which is based on his book of the same name that was about high school culture in 1981.  He went undercover for a full year as a high school student to write the book.  He then wrote another film called The Wild Life,  and directed/wrote the John Cusack classic Say Anything.  He became most famous for the film Jerry McGuire, for which he was nominated for Best Screenplay.  He then did this film 4 years later, and followed it up with Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown, and We Bought A Zoo, all of which got mixed critical and box office reception.

    Why did I feel the need to type that whole paragraph about a director/screenwriter?  Well, this film is based on his teenage years writing for Rolling Stone.  The main character, William Miller, is based on Cameron Crowe, sharing most of his history.  He even has an odd mother, which he does in real life.  (She joins him on the commentary of the director's cut of this movie, and it's very entertaining.)  The film has William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a 15 year old, posing as being 18 years old and following around a fictional band called Stillwater while they tour.  He is friends with Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), a groupie (they call themselves Band-Aids) who is having a on-off relationship with the band's guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup).  The band is in it's growing pains whilst on the verge of becoming a big name band.  There's tension between guitarist Russell and singer Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee), and the other two members of the group just want to stay out of it.  William starts to fall for Penny Lane, Russell's wife starts to suspect about Penny and Russell...  A big mess.  But that's not really important.  Cameron Crowe films are not about the over-all plot.  They're about moments.  (Cue up Jason Lee's comment about moments from Chasing Amy.) For example:

The ending to that scene is so great.  Love it.

     The movie didn't do well when it came out.  It didn't even make back it's $60 million budget.  It was, however, critically acclaimed and was nominated for three Academy Awards, and won one for Best Original Screenplay, finally winning Cameron Crowe an Academy Award.  It also won two Golden Globes and the soundtrack won a Grammy.  The film is also one of the very, very few films that Led Zeppelin has allowed their music in.  Crowe knew those guys from riding around touring with them as a journalist, and showed them the film at a private screening hoping to get their permission for song use.  They allowed him to use five of their songs in the film, but not Stairway to Heaven, which was to be used in a scene that only that song could have been used in, so they had to cut that one out.  In fact, one scene in the film is based on a anecdote that happened while he was touring with Zeppelin...

    Why does the movie connect with me?  Well, I've already mentioned my love for 70s culture in other blog posts, and of my love for 70s music in particular, which this film has tons of.  Also, who doesn't dream of riding along with their favorite band, hanging out with them on the tour bus and backstage?  The movie almost makes you feel like you're doing just that.  I suppose I see a little of myself in the main character as well.  So it's kind of a personal thing.  As I said before, the movie is full of moments.  Some people don't go for those types of films, seeking a big picture instead of a mosaic.  That type of thing doesn't bother me.  If  a film has enough really good smaller good parts, it can make a great picture.  However, this film excels on both fronts.  Hell, the movie brought Zooey Deschenel to semi-stardom!

    Now, this movie comes in two versions.  There's the theatrical cut, which is amazing, and the way I first saw the film.  There's also the Untitled version, which is the director's cut and runs over 40 minutes longer and is even more amazing!  Even the Untitled version feels too short to me at just under 3 hours long.  There's so many more little moments that bring me happiness in that version that I'm often surprised how they cut them out.  However, I suppose if they'd left them in, the critics would have gone on about how the movie was a bit too long, and the film would have made even less money.  I first saw the film during my lonely first year at UNCW.  I knew no one there, as I spent my first year at a different college, so I did what I did at that first college.  I wrapped myself up in the warm protective blanket that is cinema.  I sought out movies that just looked interesting, ones that won awards, cult classics, and of course just plain classics.  UNCW had a great film library, even better than the one at Radford, where I had spent my first year.  I wasn't expecting much from this movie, as the trailer, which I had seen many times when the film first came out, didn't do much for me.  I finally saw this one in 2005 and immediately bought the film the same night I watched the borrowed copy, it was that good.  It struck me as few films have.  It's what I needed, and it's still my 'happy' movie.  It cheers me up.

     I'm sorry if I'm not explaining my love for this film well.  It's more of a personal thing than other films on my list, so it's very hard to explain.  I'll let this next clip stand in for an explanation, as it's my favorite part of the film.  I suppose since I didn't have a rebellious high school experience, it's my way of living it.  This party scene is like a catharsis I suppose, as I had a rather sheltered teen experience being the son of a minister.  The scene after they get Russell back is also one of the best random scenes ever filmed.  A sing along on the tour bus that just breaks the ice for all the characters.  It's gone down in film history as one of the best scenes ever done, and it's so simple!  Ignore the subtitles.

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #3

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Special Edition

     Another day, another movie from the 1970s on my list.  I suppose this is due to many movies in my household as a child being from that era.  My parents were in their teens/very early twenties in the 1970s, and that's statistically when most people go to the movies the most.  Also, the 1970s produced some of the best movies out there, so there's that as well.  This is a film I had seen first probably when I was about 10.  It didn't do much of anything for me besides the last ten minutes of the film.  It wasn't until I decided to watch it again in my mid-teens that I came to really enjoy and appreciate the film, as that's when I became a fan of film, not just a casual movie-goer.  

That's an odd trailer.  So informative, and more of a press booklet.   Weird.

     The film was the other big science fiction film of 1977.  It was a big success, but let's face it, most people remember the big movie that year being Star Wars.  Close Encounters was the second biggest moneymaker of that year, earning a little more than half of what Star Wars, and Saturday Night Fever came in third.  (Oddly, all 3 of these movies have been on my list!)  The movie basically chronicles a man's growing draw towards alien life after he has a close encounter.  While this happens, his marriage and family life suffers, and his wife eventually leaves him and takes the kids.  He continues to apparently go crazy until he finds out the government is doing weird things at Devil's Tower, Wyoming.  It's there that the aliens make their real encounter with humans.  

   Now I need to explain that there's three versions of this film.  There's the original version release from 1977 which was a version that was incomplete in Spielberg's eyes.  The special effects weren't totally done and there wasn't time to edit the film the way he wanted.  Columbia Pictures needed the big hit as soon as possible to save the company, as they were about to go under.  It worked.  In 1980, the film was about to be re-released to theaters (this was done often in those days, as home video wasn't around), and Spielberg asked if he could retool it.  Columbia said he could, if he would show the inside of the spaceship at the end.  He didn't really want to, but went with it to get the rest of the film right.  This became known as the Special Edition, which was the version my family owned and the only version I saw until 2007.  In 1998, Close Encounters was again released to theaters and was again recut by Spielberg.  He always hated that he showed the inside of the ship in the Special Edition, so he cut that out, picked and chose between scenes from the 1977 and 1980 versions, added some special effects (not to the extent Lucas did to Star Wars, as you have to know what you're looking for here), and released the definitive version of the film in his view, the Collector's Edition.  I must agree with him that it's the best of the three versions.  It gets things perfect.  I can't watch the theatrical version.  I saw it in my Spielberg class in college, and I hated it.  It got rid of a lot of my favorite scenes from the Special Edition.  (Or rather the Special Edition had added them...)  The Special Edition I can still watch, but I prefer the definitive Collector's Edition that came out in the late 90s.   Unlike Lucas, Spielberg made all three versions available on the latest DVD and blu-ray edtions, which is really great for those of us that study film, or if you're just in the mood to see the differences.  It really does feel like three different films.

     Spielberg made this film right after he got through with Jaws, and it apparently was a much easier film to shoot.  This one went smoothly.  It even stars Richard Dreyfuss who was one of the stars of Jaws!  The film was nominated for 8 oscars, only winning 1 for cinematography.  It has also been selected for film preservation (as have many on this list, actually) by the National Film Registry, which is a selection of up 25  films every year starting from 1989 to be preserved by the government.  (Even 7th Voyage of Sinbad is on the list!)  

     Now about the film itself and what makes it great.  The visuals for one thing.  Spielberg says that if there's one shot that summarizes his whole career it's the one of the little boy Barry opening the door and that bright orange light shining in on him from the spaceship that's come to abduct him.  I have to agree, it's a stunning shot from one of the best scenes in the film.  That scene is really fun and really terrifying as his mother does everything she can to stop them from taking her son.  All the electronics in the house start to go haywire, the aliens (which you don't see in this scene) try to come in through every conceivable entryway to the house including the air conditioning vents which slowly unscrew and the chimney.  

         This scene is just one of quite a few breathtaking ones in the film.  It may seem quaint by today's eyes, but I love it.  There's of course the last fifteen or so minutes of the movie, which are some of the most famous minutes in cinema history where the alien spaceship and the humans communicate by musical tones.  You can tell I'm really loving a movie when I lean forward in my seat to watch most of it, and I always do that at that part of the movie.   Let's not forget the great acting talent of Richard Dreyfuss here, who just plays a man obsessed so well.  The movie really is about obsession and it's pros and cons.  He gets to make contact with the aliens, yet he loses his family in the process.  That's the one issue Spielberg says he has with the movie now.  That he'd never allow Roy Neary to go into space with the aliens at the end of the film now, because he sees that as a betrayal of family.  In fact, after Neary's family leaves him, he doesn't seem at all concerned about it.  That's always bothered me a bit too, moreso as I've gotten older.  But it is just a movie after all, and I don't think it's trying to make any statements about abandonment or anything like a recent Spielberg film would.  The film also has Francois Truffaut, the famous french director famous for jump-starting New Wave Cinema.  Some may see that as a bad thing, but really Truffaut's films are nothing like, or as experimental as the polarizing Jean-Luc Goddard is.  Truffaut has the innocence of a child, both in this film, and in the movies he directs.  Truffaut is the best guy in the movie.  There's nothing bad about him at all.  Even Neary's got bad qualities, but Truffaut's happiness of the chance to meet an alien race shines through so well it's blinding.  Also Teri Garr plays Richard Dreyfuss' annoying nagging wife way too well.  You really dislike her by time she leaves the picture, but you feel for the kids.  Now they have to live with miss Naggy McNagNag.

     The music is done by John Williams, and it's one of his best scores.  The 5 tone theme to the film is so well known, and he came up with the sequence for it.  He tried thousands of them and decided on the one that's now famous.  How he did the score for this and Star Wars in the same year, and then went right to doing Superman and Jaws 2 is really a credit to his genius.  From 1975 to 1984 I'm not sure if he ever did a non-memorable score!

    I think this film shows a childlike innocence and a certain drive and warmth that few films do.  It's almost like a Frank Capra film in that way (and that way only).  If I ever need a film that will make me feel wonder or good about the world, I watch this movie.  Hell, by the end of the film even the government aren't the bad guys!  There really is no bad guy in this film, I just realized!  That's so rare.  There's normally got to be an antagonist in Hollywood films.  I guess the wife fills that role for the first third of the film, and the government for the second third... but by the last third of the film there is no antagonist!  See, I realize new things about films this good all the time.  You can to.  I heavily endorse that you watch this film if you haven't seen it...  Watch it as a child would.  If you have already seen the film, watch it again!  Watch it in one of the other two versions!

    

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #4

Star Wars

     You all knew this was coming, didn't ya?  Well, here it is.  When I refer to Star Wars, I'm referring to the original 1977 film.  Most nowdays call it by its retconned title A New Hope.  I think it's a stupid title, and I continue to just call it Star Wars.  I grew up on the Star Wars Trilogy, even though the last film of that series came out two years before I was born.  My dad had taped The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and we had an honest-to-goodness official VHS tape of the first film.  This one, in fact.

    When I was little, Return of The Jedi was my favorite film of the three.  I think this was due to all the cool monsters that were in it and the Ewoks, which are awesome for kids but not so much for adults.   When I was a teenager, The Empire Strikes Back became my favorite of the films, as this is when I was getting really into filmmaking, and it was directed the best.  However, for the past 10 years or so, I've enjoyed Star Wars the most.  It's more of a rip-roaring adventure than Empire and it's not just a seemingly never-ending action sequence like Jedi seems to me to be these days.  Sure, it's got the worst acting, worst dialogue, and worst special effects of the three, but it's also not as heavy as the other two.  It could be self-contained, as in fact it was for 3 years after it first came out!  It was considered a stand-alone film, and sometimes I wonder if it should have stayed that way.  I'm not dissing the other two films, I'm just actively wondering if I would enjoy it even more without the backstories that the other two films, and sadly the prequel trilogy added.  Imagine never knowing that Leia and Luke are related.  Imagine not knowing anything about Darth Vader being Luke's father.  Ah, the bliss of ignorance.... Ah, the horrible fanfiction ideas that would be had!

     Everyone knows that the movie heralded in a new era of American cinema.  It helped with the rise of the summer blockbuster (though Jaws really started that), it's genius special effects started a new boom in Hollywood after all the studios had shut down their effects departments earlier in the decade, and of course it brought science fiction back to Hollywood, along with Spielberg's Close Encounters which was released the same year.  Let's also not forget the invaluable contribution that John Williams made to film scores here.  Before this film and Jaws, Williams' scores were not that memorable to general audiences.  He'd done things like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Goodbye Mr. Chips, and Earthquake.  In other words, he did melodramatic music scores, which is what the music is in this, but it just fits like a glove here.  He started to use liet-motifs for his scores with people and places being represented by a specific tune.  (Much like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and those damned tunes you had to learn to be transported different places or have that damned horse be called to you.)  This was not a new idea, as it was used a lot in the early years of film.  Really John Williams is just an old-school composer that brought back old ideas to great success.  Still, old ideas they may be, the tunes were so memorable.  Everyone knows the opening theme to Star Wars, though I prefer the end credits music which basically is a collection of the different themes used in the film all bundled together. 

     Now why choose this over the other two films?  (Don't even ask about the prequels, as I don't really like them anyway.  They are not even near the same league.)  Well, I like fun.  Pure, simple, joyful fun.  Without baggage.  This is why I love theme parks also.  There's no baggage with Star Wars.  There's no bogged down second act like there is in Empire, where we're stuck on Dagoba with Luke and Yoda.  There's none of the overwhelming darkness that's present in the other two films at times, such as whenever Luke is fighting Vader or the Emperor.  I know a lot of you are scoffing at me saying these things.  It's tantamount to heresy, but it's what I think.  The darkness of the other two films make them less fun, especially Empire.  Now I know that Lucas had never intended that film to have a clear beginning or end, as it was intended as the middle picture, but the film is mainly just exposition with a few cool battle sequences thrown in.  If you look back at initial reviews of the second and third films, they didn't get the unabashed good reviews that Star Wars got.  It's only been with the passage of time that they've grown in stature... Mainly Empire. 

     I love that Star Wars is not an origin story.  You're seemingly thrown into this story in the middle, really.  The film opens with robots escaping a hostage-taken ship in an escape pod and landing on a desert planet where they are promptly stolen by hooded midgets and sold to some farmers.  One robot runs away talking crazy, and the nephew of the farmer has to go chase after him.  Then this old hermit that lives in a cave tells the teenager that he knew his father and that he should go with him off-planet to help this girl that was in a hologram that the robot showed.  Yeah, that's basically what you think the first time you watch the movie, as besides the crawl at the beginning of the film, you come into the story cold turkey and have to figure things out as you go along.  But man did Lucas come up with some interesting characters, even if they were stolen from Kurosawa films and mythology.

    Don't forget what a breath of fresh air the film was considered when it came out.  It's contemporaries were such dark nihilistic things like Marathon Man, Saturday Night Fever, All The President's Men, Taxi Driver or Network.  All realistic, dark, and depressing.  Even the few sci-fi films of the time were on the depressing side.  (Logan's Run or Soylent Green)  Escapism needed to make a comeback, and here we had it!  Finally we could have fun at the movies again without it being a comedy!  Go watch the film with 1977 eyes and try not to be amazed!

*  A small note here:  I really dislike some of the changes Lucas made to film, but some have made the film better.  I like Luke seeing Biggs before the Battle of Yavin starts.  I like the Praxis wave when the Death Star explodes.  I like the better effects during the Battle of Yavin.  I hate Obi-Wan's new yell to scare the Sand People off, as it sounds like he got kicked in the nuts.  I hate the new Mos Eisley stuff...  Sure I liked this stuff when it first was re-released to theaters when I was 12, but now I see them for the mixed bag they are.  At least it's not as bad as the stuff they've done to Return of the Jedi, which I refuse to watch in it's altered form these days.  And seriously...  The prequels are not canon to me.  They aren't Star Wars, but simply fan fiction done by the series creator.  These aren't the stories you're looking for.

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #5

The Shining

     I have to admit this first:  I have never read the book.  It's one of the few Stephen King books I have yet to read.  Just have never gotten around to it.  I have, however, seen the 1997 mini-series that was directed by Mick Garris and which King himself did the teleplay for.  It wasn't too impressive, being pretty much a literal adaptation of the book, with no surprises.  Still, it was better than some King stuff made for TV. (The Tommyknockers being the one I usually think of.)  King made that mini-series due to a long festering idea that Stanley Kubrick didn't actually make a film of his book, but rather made his own film with ideas from the book.  That's a relevant criticism; I do agree with him on that front.  King also really disliked the casting choice of Jack Nicholson, which I do not agree with.  In my mind, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 imagining of The Shining is an almost perfect film.

     I'm a huge Stephen King fan, having read approximately 3/4 of his printed works.  When it comes to adaptations of his work, I'm not as big of a fan.  I do like this one, Carrie, Misery, The Dead Zone, Cujo, Christine, Pet Sematary, and Stand By Me if we're just counting works based on his novels and not his short stories.  There have been numerous clunkers made such as Firestarter, Graveyard Shift, The Mangler, Sleepwalkers, and Maximum Overdrive (directed by King himself, and good in a so-bad-it's-good way.).  The TV adaptations are hit or miss with things like Storm of The Century being hits and things like The Tommyknockers being misses.  

     Stanley Kubrick supposedly decided to do this film by chance.  He was going through stacks of books reading the first few pages of each trying to decide what to make next.  (Almost all his films were literary adaptations.)  For some reason he chose The Shining, which is odd as the book's opening is just a post-coital sex scene involving Mrs. Torrance.  It has nothing to do with the rest of the story really, and is not present in the film.  Stephen King was overjoyed when Kubrick decided to do the film, as he loved 2001: A  Space Odyssey.  Kubrick would call up Stephen King at all hours of the night asking him random questions such as "Does God exist?".  The film shoot was not a pleasant one, either.  Shelley Duvall, who plays Mrs. Torrance, frequently got on Kubrick's nerves as she wasn't giving the performance he wanted.  Duvall herself became physically ill for months and started to lose her hair due to the stressful experiences.  The script was being revised every day, sometimes minutes before a scene was to start shooting.  Scatman Crothers broke down in tears after Kubrick demanded he do a scene where he explains to Danny what 'shining' is 148 times.  Kubrick was infamous for being very demanding on his actors, and yet not telling them precisely what he wanted.  Apparently only a fraction of what was filmed ended up in the film, as numerous takes took up a lot of what was filmed.  The filming took place over a year when it was scheduled to take less than 6 months.

    What makes the film so good?  Gosh, that's hard to nail down.  It's not your typical jack-in-the-box horror film.  There's one jump scene I can think of in the film, and the movie is deliberately slow and tension-building like Halloween but on a more epic scale.  There's but one onscreen murder, there's a lot left unexplained, and the film is shot to confuse.  For instance, if you try to map out the hotel, it's impossible.  The hotel setup is incomprehensible if you think about it or try to map out it's insides.  Kubrick also breaks the film-making 30 degree rule, which states that if you do two shots of something or someone in succession, you need to move the camera at least 30 degrees lest you get a jump-cut.  Well, in some cases, Kubrick doesn't.  For someone who's been shooting for so long, it's hard to believe that would just be coincidence.  This film also has what I believe to be the first appearance of furries in film.

    Positively frightening!  Why does it frighten me?  Because it's like some of my nightmares where I see things that make absolutely no sense.  You ever been afraid to go back to sleep because your dream was just too weird for you?  Happens to me all the time.  Last night I was finding dead decomposing bodies in an abandoned old WWII bunker with a ghostly little girl following me.  Somehow I became convinced she'd done the killings, which was a bit of a twist.  It's things like that which can make horror films work.  Sometimes the scariest things are the unexplained.  This is where Stephen King gets things wrong sometimes, as he explains away everything by the end of the books.  Kubrick never explains things.  He wants viewers to make up their own minds, and this is the case with 2001 as well.  Explaining the evil or the haunting makes things not scary anymore.  It's like being convinced your house is haunted, and then learning that the banging and groaning you've been hearing were just the plumbing.  Problem solved, no ghosts here!

     The film is a symphony.  Alternating between almost complete silence and building to crescendos like no other movie I've seen. Things like Danny on his little tricycle going over carpet silently, and then suddenly going over the hard floor with a deafening roar to the wheels.  20 minutes will go by with nothing happening, and then suddenly you're completely surprised, like with the twin girls all of a sudden appearing at the end of a hallway during Danny's tricycle run.  If the film IS a symphony, the last 20 minutes are the 1812 Overture, as Jack goes completely insane and gives chase around the hotel trying to kill his wife and Danny.

    I first saw the film when I was 16.  My dad had owned the VHS tape since probably the late 80s, and I finally was old enough to watch it.  It's stayed with me ever since, and sometimes it still freaks me out.  It's a deeply unsettling film.  That's exactly the right word for it.  It's not disgusting or scary per say, but it stays with you and sinks in.  You're left thinking about the film wondering what the hell you just saw.  It's like Eraserhead in that way, but this one doesn't cause me headaches.  There's no other movie like this, and so it sticks out... in a good way.  Also, the film is pretty much a PSA for why no-one should marry a writer.

And now for probably my favorite scene...

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #6

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

     It's no secret.  I love stop-motion animation.  I'm not sure what it is about it precisely that I like...  If it's the long precise work that goes into it, the off-kilter feel of the effect, the amount of precision that goes into matching the effects with the live action work...  I do know that it's awesome though.  For those that don't know what stop-motion is, it's how King Kong, another one of my favorites that just barely was kept off this list, was brought to life.  That 1933 film wowed audiences when it came out during the height of the depression.  The special effects by Willis O'Brien were a pretty new thing, especially on that scale.  It's very hard to do stop-motion on a creature with hair, as the process means the hair is going to change shape every second.  Why?  Well to do stop-motion, you have an doll that has many joints on its flexible insides, and you move the joints millimeters at a time, shooting a frame of film each miniscule movement.  It's very taxing work, as 28 frames is 1 second of film.  For example, it took Ray Harryhausen, the special effects man for 7th Voyage of Sinbad 11 months to do all the effects for the film.  Ray Harryhausen, who died just a few months ago at the age of 92, was known as the master of this type of effects work.  He was apprenticed by the aforementioned Willis O'Brien, working with him on his follow-up to King Kong, Mighty Joe Young before going solo.  Harryhausen would go on to do some of the most important special effects films in the pre-Star Wars era.  He did this film, Jason and The Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, 20 Million Miles To Earth, One Million Years B.C., The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, Clash of the Titans, and more.

     Now let me clarify this...  He did not direct these films.  He helped produce them, came up with the storylines for some of them, and did all the special effects work.  So he basically did all but direct the actors.  I suppose in a way he did direct the armatures.  Along with Jason and The Argonauts, which came out 6 years later, 7th Voyage of Sinbad is considered to be Harryhausen's masterwork, and it did take stop-motion animation to a new level.  It was no done in color, and Harryhausen trademarked his specific brand of the effect and called it Dynamation.  Along with the special effects work, the film also has a fantastic score done by frequent Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann.  It's a rousing adventure score in a type that composers don't really do anymore.  Herrmann would do the score for a further 3 Harryhausen films after this.  Here, have a listen to it's main tune.

    The film is based on the many stories of Sinbad the sailor.  It's not really based on his 7th voyage, but taken from many different stories and some of the stuff is new to the film.  Sinbad rescues a magician from a cyclops on island.  The magician desperately wants to return to his island, but Sinbad won't allow it, as it's too dangerous to risk his crew.  The magician then decides to shrink Sinbad's fiance to a tiny size.  Sinbad is from Baghdad and his fiance from Chandra, two rival countries that intend to finally bond together by their marriage.  However, blame is placed on Baghdad after the princess is shrunk.  The magician tells Sinbad that he has the ingredients on his island to return the princess to normal.  Sinbad takes a crew filled with prisoners to the island, along with the magician and his fiance (who no one knows is shrunk or with them).  They get there and are terrorized by large beasts as they look for the ingredients and the magician tries to find the magic lamp and bump everyone else off.  Now I will say that the acting isn't the best, but it's not horrible either.  Back in the 1950s, you didn't go to a fantasy film to marvel at the acting, as most of the times the actors were of the b-movie variety.

     The movie is a lot of fun as Sinbad fights off monsters like the Roc, Cyclops, a living skeleton, and a dragon.  And there's a genie thrown into the mix for the kids.  The movie is less than 90 minutes long, which is perfect for a movie like this.  Unlike new fantasy films which often flirt with the 2 1/2 hour mark, this one knows what it needs to do to entertain, does it, then ends.  Sadly modern fantasy films are either bloated in length when they don't need to be, or they're short and have an incoherent story.  It's not really that hard, Hollywood!  Go simple!  They did it back in 1957, you can do it today.  

    I was introduced to this film by my dad back when I was probably around 10 years old, which is the perfect time to see this movie for the first time, or perhaps anywhere between 6 and 11.  Old enough to figure out what's going on, young enough not to be cynical about it.  This was the first Harryhausen film I saw, and it's stayed my favorite even as I saw every other film of his.  I suppose the story interests me more, as it's not just the Greek mythology of Clash of The Titans or Jason and the Argonauts, nor is it just a sci-fi monster amok film like 20 Million Miles To Earth or It Came From Beneath The Sea.  Instead it's a swashbuckler, which I've always been a sucker for.  It's kind of like the old Thief of Baghdad films (1924 and 1940), as it's drawn from Muslim tales, it's of course set partially in Baghdad, and it's just plain fun.  Sorry I can't explain myself well here, but 'fun' is the word I keep coming back to.  It's the best way to describe it.  I like to have fun sometimes, and present day cinema doesn't really offer me that often.  (Marvel Universe films excepted.)  Most fantasy today is too dark and gritty for me to have a lot of fun watching it.  These films are meant to be challenging and depressing, supposedly.  That works for me sometimes, but can I have some nice bright fun sometimes, please?  No?  Guess I'll just have to go back to my Harryhausen films then.

Here's a small video I found on youtube that showcases most of Harryhausen's work.  His work inspired most of the special effects wizards of the 1970s and 80s, especially those that worked on Star Wars, and Peter Jackson cites him as his most important role model.  In fact, the Cave Troll in Fellowship of The Ring was filmed as a tribute to Harryhausen.  

   

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #7

Dawn of the Dead

     Ok, you had to know that a George Romero movie would be on the list, right?  I mean the guy came up with the most popular version of the zombie!  (The slow shuffling, decomposing, mostly speechless ones.)  The film series started in 1968 with a very low budget black-and-white film called Night of The Living Dead, which was independently financed and was considered one of the goriest movies of the time.  It's stark, bleak, and horrifying if you take the time to think about the film.  It's basically a few people holing up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse as the recently deceased come back to life.  It's also a commentary on race relations and the coming of a new generation in America of the 1960s.  This film was a slow-building success just like most horror films before the boom in the 1980s were.  Dawn of the Dead followed a full 10 years later in 1978.  Very different from Night, this one is like a pulp novel or a violent comic book, right down to the color palette.  It's more of an action-adventure film than a horror film.  As critics would say, "It's a rip-roaring good time."  It's fun, it's violent, it's cartoony, it's suspenseful...  It's amazing.  It opened to great reviews and box office despite its not being able to be advertised in most newspapers or on TV due to its being not rated by the MPAA, who wanted to give it an X rating.  The film was followed by Day of The Dead in 1985, which was considered a disappointment when first released.  However, it has grown in stature over the years and is now considered just slightly less good than the first two films by most.  It was also the first of the films to be paid for and released by a major studio.  (Universal)  There was then a long gap between the Dead films until 2005, when Universal released Land of The Dead.  It did okay at the box office and starred John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper.  It is not, however, considered as great as the first two or three films.  An unrated version of the film was released to DVD and blu-ray featuring added CGI blood-splatter and added scenes.  This is, so far, the end of the official Dead series, though Romero would go on to do Diary of The Dead, which is a found-footage film dealing with a student film crew being stuck in the start of the zombie apocalypse.  It got mixed reviews, though I liked it.  This was followed by the not-so-good Survival of The Dead.  It's really not worth speaking of, and Romero should have been ashamed to have directed it.  

     Now, let's talk about Dawn of The Dead, shall we?  Here's the plot.  A couple working at a news station decides to leave Pittsburgh by helicopter (the male part of the couple is a helicopter pilot) while they can as the zombie apocalypse grows.  Meanwhile, there is a raid on a co-op housing building full of black and Puerto Rican immigrants that have been keeping their zombified dead in the basement.  Well, that raid goes horribly wrong and two of the men decide to join the two newscasters on the helicopter, one of the men being a friend of the pilot.  The four of them fly over Pennsylvania until they get to a mall, which they land on.  They decide to fortify themselves inside and make it a home.  That's basically the first 30 minutes of the movie and the rest involves trying to fortify the mall, make it unnoticable that they are there, trying to stock up the attic, keep the zombies out. and fight off a band of motorcycle thugs.  The film is supposedly an indictment of late 70s consumerism.  Big indoor malls were a new big thing, popping up all over America, and the mass consumerism of the Reagan era was just about to start.  This point of view is one of the things that got the film great reviews from the more high-society critics like Pauline Kael, who is my favorite critic of all time.  Like the first film, the movie has an iconic lead role for a black American.  Indeed he's the lead character, and the member of the group that takes charge.  George Romero was one of the first directors to do this, and it was so back when he did Night of the Living Dead as well.    

      A lot of younger horror fans don't like this film.  The zombies slowly shuffle along, seemingly not a big threat.  Again, as shown in the film, it's the fact that they're quiet and gang up that's the real threat.  Also, more harm comes from other humans than the zombies.  This is always true in Romero's films, and in zombie films in general.  Even The Walking Dead shows this from time to time, especially with the General character. The film is also quite a bit of a slow mover.  There are large gaps with no zombie activity.  It's supposed to draw you into the lives of the characters we're following.  Its supposed to show that living in a mall isn't all it's cracked up to be.  The characters have moments of happiness, but in total there's this feel of unhappiness in them while they're there.  After all, the world is falling apart around them.  They're just delaying the inevitable.  Despite this fact, it's still a very fun film to those of us with any attention span.

    Stylistically, the film is amazing as well.  It's not a real horror film, as I stated before.  Its an action-adventure film shot in a cartoonishly bloody way.  This film being in color, unlike the first installment meant that the special gore effects had to either look real, or they had to choose to shoot it in a way that such things weren't important.  They chose the latter.  Think of a comic-book come to life.  That's what this film is.  The blood is more orangish than blood-colored and the zombies are a greenish-grey color.  

     The music has become iconic over time.  A combination of music from Goblin, the same group that did music for Dario Argento's Suspiria, and stock music that George Romero could use for free, the music ranges from the whimsical piece that's become the most remembered queue from this film called The Gonk,  to the primal bongo/sythesizer sounds of Goblin's main title theme, the music is well remembered.  The Gonk has been used in parodies and in referencing films since the movie's release in things like Robot Chicken (end credits music done in chicken-cluck style), and in Shaun of The Dead.

     I first saw the film probably when I was 17.  I rented the VHS tape from a local rental store and immediately fell in love with the film.  I was so surprised at how fun and playful it was.  It's nothing like the preceding film or the ones that come after it.  It's also very different in tone from it's 2004 remake, which wasn't too bad either.  Romero's zombie movies are not about the zombies.  The zombies are MacGuffins in a way, used to thrust real people into positions they wouldn't be in otherwise.  Usually MacGuffins are a goal or object that the main character is trying to get to or find; one that's not really explained or is unimportant to the plot.  Hitchcock used those a lot and came up with the term.  The zombies here are unexplained.  They are an outside threat and used to keep our characters confined in this one place for most of the movie.  That's the one reason they're there.  Towards the end of the film, they seemingly have separated themselves from the zombies and everything seems like it will be okay.  In the end, its other human beings that mess everything up and cause the most damage.  When a zombie film becomes about the zombies, it becomes boring, stale, and usually gets horrible reviews.  Romero even started to make that mistake after a while, when he got the zombies to start evolving, especially in the last film.  It kind of worked in Day of the Dead, as it's only one zombie that's effected, but by Survival of The Dead, they start getting into domestication of them and such and it got silly.  Still, if you're looking for a great zombie film, but don't want to just watch people having the dead jump out at them, this is the film for you.  Please note that the film is gory, but not in a lifelike way.  It's very cartoonish.  Please not that the film is also a product of the late 70s.  Full of garish fashions and 70s style music.  It's part of the reason I like the film so much, but I know most don't have a 1970s obsession like I do.  The film's just so damned fun and surprisingly adventuresome.

* There are many different cuts to this film.  In America, there's the theatrical cut, which is Romero's preferred version, and the one I recommend as it flow's best.  There's also an extended cut, which Romero says is not his preferred version, but it's there if you'd like to see it.  There's also a cut made by the co-producer, Suspiria director Dario Argento, which called either the Argento cut or the European cut, as it's what the film was released like in Europe.  It cuts out most of the humor, adds some more gore, and doesn't use the stock music.  It instead uses more stuff by Goblin.  I gave it a try and it didn't really work for me.  Go with the theatrical cut.

  And if you want to know what The Gonk is, you probably heard it before.  Here it is...

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #8

Jaws

     I both love and hate the ocean.  I love its power and beauty....  I don't love it's nastiness and the fact that I don't know what's within a 100 yard radius swimming in there with me.  I have great respect for it.  Oddly enough, that's not totally because of this film.  No, I would be afraid of the ocean anyway.  Even if I was just close to a whale or something.  Something that big swimming around me would really freak me out almost as much as a shark would.  Heck, the shark's smaller!  

     Jaws was made in 1975 by a director that had done a TV movie that did quite well, and a smaller film that the critics liked, but most people today don't even know about called The Sugarland Express, which starred Goldie Hawn.  It was based on a not-too-great book by Peter Benchley, who actually is in the film as a news reporter in one scene.  The book was stripped down to just the bones and that's what's in the movie.  None of the stuff about Mrs. Brody having an affair, nothing about the mafia running the town through the mayor, or illegal fishing methods. (Thank God)  The story is instead a simple one about a shark coming to feed off the waters of Amity Island, the town not closing the beaches so attacks still happen, another attack happens on July 4, the beaches are closed and Chief Brody, Quint, and Hooper go out to catch them a killer shark.  Deceptively simple.  What sets the movie apart from crap environmental terror films like Food of The Gods, Frogs, Tentacles, or The Swarm is that besides being much more believable, the acting is great and it's more of a suspense film than simply a carnage film.  

     Spielberg made a very suspenseful film partially out of necessity.  He originally wanted to show the shark more, but the damned thing never worked right.  He got just enough footage of the shark to make the film work, he says, and due to this fact, he's been called a genius.  Well, he is great, but come one, he didn't show the shark because he couldn't.  That's why we have the barrels signifying where the shark is late in the movie and why we have shark POV for quite a bit of the film.  But man, when you first see that shark, it's haunting.  And no, unlike what everyone seems to remember, it's not when Brody is feeding chum into the water.  Why does everyone forget the scarier view of the shark that we get a full 30 minutes earlier?!  I couldn't find the footage on youtube, but a man on a rowboat is talking to Brody's kid and his two friends as they try to get the sail ready on his sailboat.  The man's rowboat is knocked by the shark, and the boys fall off their boat as well.  The man tried to get on his capsized rowboat, but the shark comes from behind, (you see this from an above view as the shark comes at him under the water), and bites his leg off. 

The scene was actually supposed to be longer and include this...

Now that's a much more frightening introduction to the shark than the chum scene later on, which for some reason everyone thinks is the first time you see the shark.  That's also some heavy stuff for a PG rated film.  Still, PG-13 was not around back then, and the way the producers got the PG rating was by saying that it happens in nature, and that it's not something that someone can do to someone else.  True brilliance on their part, but I am so glad I didn't see the whole movie until I was 11 or so.  I'd have been traumatized.  Jaws is a pretty darn brutal film, but then again so is nature.

     The scene that sticks with me after all these years goes to something you rarely see in any movies.  The death of a child in a horror film, especially done so graphically, is so surprising...  The Steven Spielberg of today would never shoot this.   The Alex Kintner death still kind of disturbs me, actually and its partially due to the way it's shot.  You see it from Brody's point of view on the beach, and it's hard to tell what's really going on.  You just see a geyser of blood, a kid flailing, and something else over there doing something to him.  Start this clip at 3:20. 

 Also gotta love that dolly in with a zoom out as Brody sees what's happening in the water.  Hitchcock had used it before in Vertigo, but perhaps this is the best known use of it.  There's just something about seeing the attack as you would from the beach that's chilling to me.  I guess because that's how you'd probably really see such an attack (unless you're the one being attacked of course).  So yes, the film has some great shark attack sequences.  And who could forget the first attack scene right before dawn, so beautiful but so frightening, or Quint's death near the end, which is very graphic and ironic.  

    However, when I view Jaws, I feel like I'm watching two films... Not to it's detriment mind you.  The first 2/3 of the film is a pure terror film.  The last third is a seafaring adventure.  One that's very exciting; it even has pirate music!  Speaking of music, the score is so important as it is to most horror films.  Like Halloween or Psycho, Jaws has a very simple theme that works on a primal level.  Just a few deep notes done at different speeds in different combinations, and it won Best Score at the Academy Awards that year.  With this movie, it's done on Oboe, on Halloween it was piano, on Psycho it was violins.  Fantastic just what a chillingly simple score can do to create feelings of dread and heighten suspense.

    I had seen the last third of the film a few times, mostly on 4th of July on TBS.  I knew that part of the movie had the least gore and was least scary.  My dad had told me so.  However, one day I decided to conquer my fears and watch the movie from beginning to end.  A love affair was born for this craftfully made film.  One that's given us so many memorable quotes, nightmares, fears of the ocean, and a hell of a film to study.  Seriously, next time you sit down to watch Jaws, make sure to notice how much effort went into it.  Notice how the red herrings of the shark being around never have the theme music.  They never cheat you in that way.  Notice how a lot of the time when on the water, things are filmed from water level which heightens the tension.  Marvel at the hideousness of mayor's outfits! 

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #9

Halloween

     I've always liked horror movies.  I even liked them before I was able to see them.  Before I became a teenager, I didn't get to see many of them, as most were rated R, and I didn't start watching movies of that rating until was 15.  I was able to watch the old Universal horror films of the 30s and 40s, which I loved, along with tamer things like  Poltergeist (which I still didn't see until I was 12) or the original House on Haunted Hill or most of the Hammer horror films from the 60s.  I did study horror extensively, however.  I read about the films, I knew the whole plot of a lot of them, and was just waiting for the day I could see them.  The film I studied the most without watching it, along with The Exorcist, was Halloween.  This started back when I only knew of the really popular horror films.  Even before I saw it, I knew it wasn't just another slasher film like Friday The 13th or My Bloody Valentine.  And when I finally saw the film, it more than lived up to it's reputation.

     I had seen bits and pieces of the film either from accidentally walking in on my dad watching the film or seeing clips from TV specials about horror films and stuff like that.  I knew it was artfully filmed and to this day I love pretty much everything about it.  The music, which John Carpenter, the director, says was partially inspired by the scores for Suspiria and The Exorcist, makes the film.  The movie would not be effective without the music.  Carpenter himself has said that at the preview screening with some friends and executives, the movie didn't work.  No jumps, no scares.  He decided to save the movie with music, which he did to great effect.  I don't know of anyone who doesn't know the theme music at least.  It's up there with the Twilight Zone theme for recognition and creepiness.  Carpenter also was a bit of an Argento type with the way he chose to film the movie.  He used first-person shots of Michael Myers as we are him stalking his prey.  They used the new Steadicam system to do this, which provided smooth movement with a handheld camera, giving you freedom to go up and down stairs and such, which would have been impossible with a dolly.  First person had been used in Italian Giallo movies for years, which was the genre that Argento was known for, and it had been used in a prior slasher film as well; a 1974 Canadian film called Black Christmas.  So he didn't really create this style of film-making, but American audiences had not really been shown it on a mass scale.  The lighting is something everyone seemingly looks over when talking about the movie.  It's one of my favorite aspects, but recent releases of the film have ruined it.  The movie originally had a bluish tint to it, which was done on purpose, as confirmed by cinematographer Dean Cundey.  This color timing debacle is supposed to be remedied in the new 35th anniversary edition coming out in September, so fingers crossed.  Anyway, the bluish tint gives a whole different feel to the film, making the night-time scenes almost dreamlike.  Carpenter also uses shafts of light with a lot of shadow to mask areas where Michael could be when he's not being seen in the background of a shot, almost like it could have been great as a black and white film.

     The film has no gore in it.  I know, shocking right?  Watch it again.  Other than a little out of focus blood in the first murder scene and a cut on Laurie's arm, there's no blood either.  The movie is more of a thriller than a typical slasher film.  Psycho had more blood!  A lot of people remember the movie as being gory and gross.  No, that's Halloween II and onward, as by the time that film came out in 1981, the slasher era was in full force.  The movie is actually rated R for nudity and language, not for blood and guts.  John Carpenter and Debra Hill have stated that they wanted to make a jack-in-the-box movie where things jump out at you from out of the dark, or where you sit there the whole time anticipating things to happen, and that's what they delivered.  And it's why I love the movie so much.  It's so much more classy than it's imitators or it's remake (which I enjoyed on it's own merits).  In fact, the film is actually really slow moving if you think about it.  You spend probably 9/10 of the movie waiting for things to happen.  Besides the first 5 minutes and the last 30, there's really no on-screen violence!  There's a few jump scares, sure, but no chase scenes.  Speaking of chase scenes, the last 15 minutes are pure suspense genius.  From the moment Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) walks into the house her friend and her friend's boyfriend are in, it's one of the most suspenseful 15 minutes of film out there.  I've studied those last few minutes over and over, it's just so perfectly done.  She goes up to that house with the droning, repetitive music going on the soundtrack.  She walks slowly in... and the music stops.  Now you know that anything can happen at any moment.  Modern films don't cut the music.  They do a build-up of strings, which any film fan can tell you ruins the suspense.  You know right when something's going to jump out or something bad is going to happen.  It's like walking into a room with the lights on.  When you cut the music it's like walking into a dark room and closing the door behind you.

     The movie was shot in southern California on a very low budget in the spring of 1978.  Odd for a movie set in Illinois in the fall of 1978 (and 1963 at the beginning of the film).  In fact, they had to spread leaves along the ground to make it look like fall, and you can see palm trees and mountains in some of the shots, neither of which exist in Illinois, of course.  It was shot on $300,000 in just 20 days.  The film was released in time for Halloween of 1978.  It did okay at first...  Then it did better... and better...  The film only came to be known as the most successful independent film of all time due to word of mouth.  The film crew and cast had started to think the film had flopped!  It wasn't until they started to get calls from newspapers that they knew they had a hit. 

    The movie may not seem like much to modern audiences.  It's a slow tension-builder, and modern audiences don't have the patience for that.  The editing doesn't use quick cuts, but rather lingers on shots; another loss for today's audience.  I've had friends tell me it's boring after watching it.  That there's not enough sex and blood.  Well, if you want that have sex with a virgin, guys.  This movie is an example of good film-making, unlike most other horror films.  Modern audiences cannot appreciate film, and it saddens me.  The modern cinema experience tends to be to go to a film, look at your phone with some background noise, maybe shout some things at the screen, then go and tell your friends how bad the movie you didn't actually see because you were staring at your Iphone the whole movie was.  Pathetic.

No, if you want to appreciate a good horror film, see this one... and I mean see it.  Don't just look at it.  It's a work of art.

30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #10

The Wizard of Oz/Return To Oz

     The Wizard of Oz is usually one of the first non-animated movies that a child remembers seeing.  It's been a staple of television screenings since 1956, which was around the time television really started to get a foothold in American households.  It's a beloved classic that nearly everyone has seen at least once in their lifetime.  As such, it's pretty obvious this would be on my list.  A little less obvious is the film it's tied with, the 1985 Disney film Return To Oz.  That film didn't do well when it came out, is rarely shown on television, and scarred little kids for a while after they saw it.  Two very different films set in the same magical land created in 1900 by a populist, theater loving, entrepreneur L. Frank Baum.  Baum wrote 14 Oz books, which he tried to end halfway through, having gotten tired of it.  He attempted to write books of other characters and lands, but they didn't sell, so he wrote more Oz until he died.  There are 40 official Oz books in total, with publisher-picked authors taking up the series after Baum died.  I've loved the books since I was in elementary school. 

     Let's start with 1939's The Wizard of Oz.  The movie had a troubled production, partially due to the fact that a film like this had never been tried before.  That's not to say that the book had not been adapted before.  It had by Baum's production company in 1910.  But that was a low budget affair, and this was to cost much more.  2.8 million dollars!   The new Technicolor process made it so they had to use more lights, which meant that the sets were well above 100 degrees, Buddy Ebsen's Tin Man paint ended up coating the inside of his lungs leading him to ICU in the hospital and having to drop out of the film, the movie went through 4 directors in it's early weeks and another one at the end of filming, and the movie was going overschedule.  The fact that the film ended up as great as it did is a marvel in and of itself.  Margaret Hamilton was badly burned during a special effects sequence when she disappears from Munchkin city.  The red smoke and some fire rises from the ground, and she's supposed to go down a trap door.  Well, on the second take the fire caught to her copper-based green makeup and she got second degree burns on her face.  Then they tried to get her to do the stuff on the broom with the smoke coming out of the back of it, and she refused.  The stuntperson tried it, and the broom kind of exploded.  Yeah, this is the stuff that happened with early special effects.  Trial and error.  

     Despite all the trouble, it was worth it.  The movie opened to great reviews, the critics calling it a second Snow White, which is what MGM was going for.  The songs would be remembered by countless generations of people, especially Somewhere Over The Rainbow, which actually was almost removed from the movie.  But what makes this film so much a part of my life?  Well, it's so imaginative, so otherworldly, and so much fun!  Sure, you can see the wires that hold up the flying monkeys if you look for them, but are you really doing so when you first see the movie, or even the tenth time?  Probably not.  That's adult cynicism coming in.  It's also probably the first movie with scary moments a child sees.  I know my sister was afraid of trees due to this film...  I don't think I was ever really effected by it negatively, but Oz's giant bald head being projected with the smoke and flames used to intimidate me.  I know some are scared of Margaret Hamilton as the wicked witch, but seriously Glinda scares me more...  I think she's hiding an evil side.  No one is that nice, and it always seems like a fake nice, ya know?  Imagine seeing this piece of American cinema in the theaters in 1939.  I wish I had a time machine to travel back and see it during it's first release, if just to see how people reacted to it.  Now it looks kind of stagey.  Like a play almost.  I mean, there's very obvious matte paintings (gorgeous ones, though), there's wire work, and it's a musical...  But sometimes simplicity is best.  

     To change gears lets talk about Return to Oz... and what a complete horror-show it is.  I think I first saw it when I was 7 or 8 and it really creeped me out.  It's set after Wizard of Oz by about a year, even though it was filmed almost 50 years later.  Dorothy is played by a younger actress (Fairuza Balk), and she still lives with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, who think she's going crazy due to her nightmares about Oz...  Which of course was only a dream as it follows the continuity set by the MGM musical, not the book in which she really did go to Oz.  So they send her a mental institution where she's about to be given shock treatment.  (See, told you it was different.)  Right before being administered, the power goes out and Dorothy escapes aided by another girl.  The other girl apparently drowns in the river saving Dorothy.  Dorothy arrives in Oz with a talking hen, and travels the ruined Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, which is in ruins and everyone has been turned to stone except the Wheelers, which have caused countless child viewers nightmares... and Princess Mombi, who has a collection of heads.  Yeah, enough to cause many children nightmares.  Watch this:

     Yes my friends, the stuff nightmares are made of.  Ah, what the 1980s thought kids were prepared for.  Wish we'd still make these types of family movies.  Kids need to be scared.  

     Now the movie isn't all nightmarish.  No, there's also a talking pumpkinhead named Jack, a hastily put together pile of sofas and animal head called a Gump, a walking mechanical man named Tik-Tok and of course the hen Belina.  The special effects in this film are very 80s, so don't expect much more than stop motion animation and blue screen.  This film is based on the second and third Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and the movie has more of the tone of the books than the MGM musical did.  Also to set it apart from the 1939 film, this movie is NOT a musical and it's not a rich Technicolor experience.  No, in fact the film is very drab and run down looking, as Oz is supposed to be spoiled by the Nome King and Mombi.  Seriously, if you haven't watched this film, do so.  It's a real treat.

     These two films got me to read the Oz books, which I still read to this day.  They are great examples of childrens' literature, and are very easy to get sucked into.  I will say that the 1939 film is one example of a film being better than it's paper-bound counterpart, if only for the fact that the first Oz book isn't that special.  Still, try out both the book and film, as the book is very different from the film.  Very few people have grown up without watching The Wizard of Oz, very few have seen Return to Oz (though that should be remedied), and an average amount of people will see Oz The Great and Powerful, which was released earlier this year.  (It was good.)  Oz still has a place in today's world.  It's a world of little technology and full of wild unexplored areas... and unlike 95% of fantasy worlds, it ain't crap!  Introduce this world to your kids, reintroduce yourself to it!  You're never too old for Oz.  It's not Neverland, after all!  Come on, have a heart, have a brain, get some courage!