Say Anything (1989): After churning out two teen party movies in the early '80s, Cameron Crowe initiated the second phase of his career - sickenly sweet romances for modern singles - with this gem. John Cusack was born to play Lloyd Dobbler, every 18-year-old girl's platonic ideal of the perfect boyfriend. Cusack is so good he overshadows fine performances by Ione Skye and the guy who plays the father on Frasier; heck, his performance even overshadows Crowe's sappy script. Auteur theory blown to shreds - actors do matter, after all.
Grade: A-
Singles (1992): Two types of people were attracted to this movie: those who came for the music, and those who wanted a nice date flick. And both parties were satisfied. This follows the love life of hip young Seattlites, one of whom is the rather dense lead singer for a hapless grunge band. It's Bridget Fonda who steals the show, though, with a hilarious subplot concerning her anxiety over her breast size.
Grade: A-
Slacker (1991): This film coined the infamous term for downwardly mobile '90s youth, who aren't that different from downwardly mobile bohemians of any random era. The movie has no plot whatsoever, and no main characters. The camera simply follows seemingly random people off the street and lets you hang with them for a few minutes before seguing into another completely different set of cats. Set in Austin, the hippie capital of Texas, the odd assortment of weirdos and flakes makes for one of the most fascinatingly off films I've seen.
Grade: A
Still Crazy (1998): This likable film falls somewhere between the satire of This Is Spinal Tap and the male-bonding warmth of The Full Monty, and that's where it stumbles: this tale of a '70s hard rock band on the reunion trail can't decide whether it's a comedy or drama, and while some success is found in both areas, overall both aims are diffused. Strange Fruit are a sendup of the archetypal third-string '70s hard rock band, who packed the arenas but are all but forgotten today for good reason -- this could be the story of Hawkwind, Wishbone Ash, and a hundred other '70s groups. The music, written and performed for the film by members of Foriegner, ELO, and Squeeze, hits the bullseye -- the songs are dependably mediocre but not downright awful (some titles: "Cry Freedom", "The Flame Burns On"), strongly reminiscent of Bad Company in style and quality. Strange Fruit dissolved after a disastrous concert 20 years ago, and the four remaining members have all taken separate paths. Tony, the keyboardist, gets the idea when a fan approaches him in a bar, and sets out to find the surviving members (the guitarist, Brian, is presumed dead from a drug overdose): the bassist, Les, now runs a roofing business; the drummer, Beano, works in a greenhouse and is paranoid about being caught by the tax revenuers; the lead singer, Ray, the only one who has tried to stay in the music biz, has plans to sell his mansion now that he's broke and suffers from his domineering Swedish wife running his life because Ray has forgotten the basic skills of getting through a mundane day. What enables the film to rise above to a near-exceptional level is the strength of the characters, four middle aged men who are painfully aware that they've grown from wild youths to old and ugly geezers. The most complex and poignant member is Ray, whose aching distress at the loss of his youth and his unsure grasp on life outside his fishbowl become surprisingly sad and poignant.
Grade: B+
Straw Dogs (1971): This is one fucked-up movie, and in some quarters caused more controversy than even The Wild Bunch. Dustin Hoffman plays a mild-mannered mathematician whose manhood is called into question by a gang of Cornwall thugs, who kill his cat and then rape his wife. Nothing much happens in the first half, because Peckinpah is just setting up the characters so that we can get to know them and care about what happens; when Susan George's character is raped, it sets off the second half like a dynamite fuse. There's less violence here than in most Peckinpah films, but it has more of an impact and makes the viewer much more uncomfortable when it happens. This movie raises some troubling questions, not the least of which is why Peckinpah felt he had to make this kind of explicitly macho, pro-violence statement, and unsettled me more than any other movie I can think of in recent memory. Peckinpah's vision is morally repugnant and violently misogynist - no one will argue that. The American Leni Reifenstahl (I'm not joking)?
Grade: originally an A; after second thoughts, a C+ or B-. It's not particularly entertaining; I originally believed that a movie that drew such an emotional reaction out of me had to be on to something great - however, the emotion Peckinpah drew out of me was mainly disgust. Morally, it's an F.
Suburbia (1997): This movie (which reads like a stage play) scripted by Eric Borgosian, is sharp, funny, in your fuckin' face, and overly cynical and facilely nihilistic like all of Borgosian's work. Given those qualities, I'd be genuinely shocked if Borgosian didn't come from New Jersey. A very dark portrait of the dead-end lives of losers inhabiting Any 7-11 Parking Lot, USA, these are slackers who've stopped smoking dope enough to wake out of their stupor and realize how shitty their lives really are. The key epiphany occurs when one of the characters says that 20 years ago there were some other losers hanging out in the same parking lot, and 20 years from now other losers are going to replace them, so what's the freakin' point?
Grade: A
Swoon (1992): Mention the Leopold-Loeb child murder case and it rings a faint bell, but what's been overlooked in past treatments of the case (notably Alfred Hitchcock's Rope) is that Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were homosexual lovers. Understandable due to the social restraints of the times (women were barred from the courtroom because they were deemed not fit to hear testimony regarding such 'perversions'), but in the gay '90s ripe for rediscovery as subject matter. The real perversion of Leopold and Loeb was their motivation in brutally slaying a young boy: after committing a series of petty crimes of theft and vandalism, these bored pretty rich decadents plot to randomly kidnap and murder the son of a wealthy family, not primarily for the money, but to prove that they could kill someone and get away with it. Fascinating material, and Kalin doesn't stoop to simplistic statements regarding the conditions of gays in '20s society (these two would have been psychopaths if they were a heterosexual couple), but unfortunately, this is one movie in which the auteur seriously mars the film through his heavy-handededness. Filmed entirely in black and white to sometimes stunning effect, Kalin seems way too impressed with his skills behind the camera -- in other words, he's interested in texture at the expense of story. The word is pretentiousness -- at times you might wonder whether you've stumbled onto a Calvin Klein commercial -- and, to a lesser degree, a bit boring.
Grade: C