I was sitting behind the computer the other day, dumping footage into Adobe Premiere, completely bored out of my mind and I started thinking…what was the most important year in film for me? By that I mean: What year contained the most movies, the instances that affected me the most…what year impacted me the most in terms of film?
And in this instance I don’t mean quality. As I am sure, you are all going to destroy most of the reasoning behind why most of the films I point out have affected me, but it’s a question I hope most of you address in the comments, and as we’re all of different ages, I’m interested to see what years are chosen.
So, to start, My Most Important Year in Film was…(drumroll please)…1989.
Just when I think I’ve found my favorite early works, another comes along to take its rightful place at the top of the food chain.
First, is Burton’s stop-motion masterpiece, VINCENT.
This is a strikingly-shot and handsomely-written film spoken in a verse-style that appears to be an autobiographical script of what one would surmise Mr. Burton grew up wanting to be.
The young man involved describes how he grew up wanting to be Vincent Price and how he has different ideas of things he wants to do compared, I assume, to what the status quo says to do.
Enough from me. Enjoy this, the first Tim Burton film. A true masterpiece of lighting, animation and writing.
“You’re not Vincent Price, you’re Vincent Malloy. You’re not tormented or insane, you’re just a young boy.”
Why this has not become a legendary children’s story, I don’t know.
**Interesting fact: Burton’s girlfriend, an executive at Disney, produced this.
The next I could only find in three parts:
His first major foray into directing, with big names and production values, but still an early film, was FRANKENWEENIE.
Filled again, with stark blacks and whites and harsh shafts of light in a world that, rather than seemingly shot on a backlot, seems to exist perfectly in that Leave It To Beaver world where if you visited the backlot, you would think you were intruding on a neighborhood you shouldn’t be disturbing.
This is, once again, a masterpiece of the psychological underpinning of what it takes to be a child in a world that shows how random terrible things can happen…and what some children think they may be able to do to reverse the awful fates that befall some things.
No doubt, Burton just wondered what it would be like to bring back a dead dog, but he added so much more depth to that simple idea.
Dare I say, I feel, after viewing these two films, Burton has fallen far off his initial brilliance as he made his way through the studio system. What types of movies could this man have made had he stayed independent?
My love of Batman aside, that movie now seems like a large wart of a blemish on his career, a steam-rolled contract hit fostered by those two wunderkind of the Sony system who, it seems, fooled everyone in a town where what you can say and get means more than what you can do. But who am I to question men who make so much money in a very profitable business.
And please don’t get angry, but after these films, Burton strikes me as the dark version of Steven Spielberg, making pitch-prefect representations of the dark side of suburbia, what kids think of when they think about what they wouldn’t want to tell anyone.
All of that aside, this is a great movie, a sign of a brilliant talent, and a very enjoyable watch, with an ending that brings child and adult together in the implication of Burton saying that no one is immune to child’s impulses.
Volume 2 of this series now focuses on two of Scorsese’s early short films.
The first is:
What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?
This was a Scorsese short film that seemed to fall between his first film, Vesuvius VI (which I couldn’t find, and which is apparently, amazingly, a Roman Epic inspired by 77 Sunset Strip. Man…I want to see that) and It’s Not Just You, Murray!, about an aging mobster, which seems to be available on an anthology entitled Early Works.
In this short, you can find the energy and style that would color his later films. There are some really-well-done camera shots, like at 3:18, an awesome dolly around an illuminated face.
The second short, made in 1967, arguably his most popular and well-known, is the short entitled The Big Shave or Viet-’67.
This is apparently an allegory on the Vietnam war how Scorsese saw it at the time. I was a bit trepadatious about how much praise I’ve heard about this short, but it’s surprisingly well-made and really rather affecting, given the idea of what Scorsese was obviously going for, given the alternate title.
It’s a very simple short, and pretty powerful. With an economy of place and some great music, we watch a man enter the bathroom and…shave. What happens at the end is where it gets pretty powerful and intense.
One thing that sticks out to me, pretty greatly, is how well-edited the two shorts happen to be. Operating at a pretty high level for being so early.
So I thought I would try something new here and do a series of posts on the early, early works of directors I admire and who I think have made major contributions to the medium of filmmaking.
For the inaugural post I thought I would shed light on a really early work of a major Hollywood director, Quentin Tarantino.
From the YouTube Synopsis by username World2008rain:
“My Best Friend’s Birthday (1987) is an unfinished black and white independent film by Craig Hamann and Quentin Tarantino, while they were working at the now shuttered Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. The project started in 1984, when Hamann wrote a short 30-40 page script about a young man who continually tries to do something nice for his friend’s birthday, only to have his efforts backfire. Tarantino became attached to the project as co-writer and director, and he and Hamann expanded the short script into an 80 page script. On an estimated budget of $5,000, they shot the film on 16mm over the course of the next four years. Hamann and Tarantino starred in the film, along with several video store and acting class buddies, and worked on the crew, which included fellow Video Archives employees Rand Vossler and Roger Avary. The film is the most overtly comic that Tarantino has made. Tarantino himself referred to it as like a “Jerry Lewis movie”. The original cut was about 70 minutes long but due to a fire only 36 minutes of the film survived. The 36 minute cut has been shown at several film festivals. It has never been officially released.”
A few thoughts:
1.) Listen closely in the first part and you’ll hear the name of a familiar radio station.
2.) The man who comes out of the bathroom in part 2 is, apparently, one of the police with the German Shepherd in the bathroom in Reservoir Dogs.
3.) Starting at 4:50 of the second part there is a rather ambitious and pretty brilliant shot that is one take and involves no cuts and what I can only assume is a dolly or some sort of rig that allowed him to get the shot he got. An early hint that this man really knew what he was doing. Awesome.
4.) Funny. There’s a reference to Aldo Raine in part 3 at the 5:00 minute mark.
5.) What was the whole subplot with the African-American? Big question mark.
6.) Part 3 has a great what seems like a 360-degree pan of a bedroom and the posters on the walls glancing over the woman on the bed and ending on Tarantino at the 9:08 mark.
7.) The commenters say a lot of this script was recycled or re-purposed for True Romance. Would have to watch the two together to say with any certainty.
8.) A strong use of music is present in this film.
Give your thoughts. Would be interested to know what you all think.
Be careful, there is quite a bit of objectionable material herein. You have been forewarned.
In a little over a week, a movie is being released.
For all intents-and-purposes…a big movie. A big summer movie by a well-respected director and starring, really, three just-as-well-respected actors. (Eckhart, masterful so long ago in “In The Company of Men“, deserves every bit as much respect as Bale and Ledger will surely receive.)
I and some of my colleagues here on Gone Elsewhere have decided to go “off-the-grid”, so to speak, so as to go into the movie with as little spoiled as possible, as possible as that can be in today’s “Tell me now, tell it all to me now” culture.
I can’t remember being this immersed in a movie’s release since the original Batman in 1989. Even the prospect of Michael Keaton sullying the cowl couldn’t drown out my fanboy, 16-year-old fervor, long before “fanboy fervor” was as strong and marketable a commodity as it is now.
Besides the obvious jaw-droppingly-good job that is being done by the marketing team for Warner Brothers, I would like to assert a theory I am sure will drive much discussion: Batman is the single greatest, most durable and universal dramatic character creation in modern American drama.*
In this short post, I will most surely miss creations that don’t really work in the context of this argument. Many will say that Sal Paradise is grievously missing, that Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Holden Caulfield should be there and that I’m missing Kilgore Trout, to which I can only say: find a blog or the comments section and explain to me why I am so grievously wrong. Go ahead, the internet is an open forum…I can take it.
