Mystery Train (1989)

I love anthologies! Why don’t they make more anthologies? Yorgos Lanthimos made Kinds of Kindness this year—did I see it? Oops, I’m part of the problem! But I look forward to seeing it because anthologies are perfect for short attention spans (like mine). Don’t like the story? Just wait for the next one. If you want to argue that anthologies are annoying because the movie keeps having to stop and restart, let me try to convince you to reconsider with this review of Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.

Continue reading →

As Tears Go By (1988)

It’s the height of the Hong Kong film industry and screenwriter Wong Kar-wai has been given his first chance at directing a feature. Thanks to John Woo, gangster movies are all the rage and Wong has an idea that will make his picture unique: he’ll focus on young, unaccomplished gangsters instead of grizzled badasses. A story about a young man who’s caught between a blossoming romance and his hotheaded partner. Basically he’s remaking Mean Streets but that’s not important right now. What you need to know is that, for a while, As Tears Go By doesn’t feel particularly remarkable. And then, at about the halfway point, this happens:

Continue reading →

Wings of Desire (1987)

Wings of Desire is a low-key metaphysical meditation on urban loneliness that kept surprising me. Not because of its novel storytelling or its “stunning tapestry of sounds and images” (thanks official Criterion description) but little funny things that I probably should have known about going in. For instance, Peter Falk is in this as himself. An actor shows up on a movie set in Berlin and people call him Colombo and yep, that’s Peter Falk. Later, we find out that Peter Falk, the real human actor who lived in our world from 1927 to 2011, is a former angel who decided to become a mortal man. That’s a big swing! And just one more thing, Wings of Desire ends on a “To be continued.” Did you know this? I’ve always known there was an America remake that inexplicably pairs up Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, but somehow I never noticed that Wim Wenders made a sequel in 1993 called Faraway, So Close! We live in a joyous world full of discoveries to make.

Continue reading →

Desert Hearts (1985)

When we picked our movies on the Criterion Draft podcast, I clearly didn’t know exactly what this movie was, since I referred to it both as a “road movie” and taking place in “Reagan’s America”. Neither of these things are true, since pretty much all of the film takes place in and around one city (Reno, Nevada), and I must have forgotten that this movie takes place in 1959 when we recorded that podcast. Still, Desert Hearts nonetheless had more or less the vibe I was hoping it would have, since it does feature a lot of scenes in cars of characters getting to know each other better (like in a road movie) and also features two women having to hide their romantic feelings for each other, much like they would have to in most places in Reagan’s America that weren’t New York or San Francisco. Continue reading →

After Hours (1985)

It’s satisfying to find any connective tissue that exists between our Criterion Month selections, especially well after we’ve drafted them. So imagine my delight when a very particular line in the middle of After Hours triggered me, and I went on Wikipedia and found, against all odds, that one of the inspirations for this movie was The Trial by Franz Kafka, the film adaption of which I just posted about. You see, in After Hours there’s a scene where Paul (Griffin Dunne) is trying to get into a club and its bouncer (Clarence Felder) won’t tell him why he’s not being allowed in. Paul offers the bouncer a bribe and he takes it but claims its only because he doesn’t want Paul to feel he “left anything untried.” That is a direct reference to “Before the Law” from The Trial (and specifically the wording from Welles’ version), a reference Scorsese included because he believed Kafka’s parable reflected his own frustration with trying to get The Last Temptation of Christ made. Fuckin’ A, right?

Continue reading →

Streetwise (1984)

The first time I read about Martin Bell’s 1984 film Streetwise was in the December 2009 issue of Seattle Metropolitan Magazine. The issue was dedicated to “75 Years of Seattle Movies,” and no film in that issue piqued my interest like Streetwisee. A gritty documentary about teens living on the streets of my city? But Seattle’s not a dangerous, hardened, urban jungle like New York, right? Right?!?

Continue reading →