Why Patton and Fast Times

Some of you may be wondering why I chose to review two such different movies, Patton and Fast Times at Ridgemont High last month. Maybe I should explain. The point is, these pictures mark the beginning and the end of the best era of American film-making. Stick to movies that came out between these two.

Patton upped the ante on psychological insight. After Patton (1970) came The Conversation, Five Easy Pieces, Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Two Lane Blacktop, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, movies with crazy heroes, sick individuals with real beating hearts. Compare their heroes with Mr. Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (1968). In the Heat of the Night is a great movie, with a great score and the always entertaining Rod Steiger, but Sidney Poitier's hero is totally inhuman once you get to know him. Likewise Steve McQueen's Thomas Crown (1968) is a super cool zero. Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is another good example. Heroic, but too pure, too simple. There's no aha! this is real life! You have to go back to the 1950s, say to Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy to find to find a high level of complexity in a central character. But On the Waterfront was a rarity. Even genre movies in the 1970s had substance and psychological complexity.

At the end of the decade came Fast Times. Like a 1970s movie, it's serious about journalistic integrity and serious about taking on the tough issues. There's an abortion. All the characters have depressing part-time jobs at the mall or in convenience stores, other than the one who scalps concert tickets. But it's also funny. The history teacher says Aloha all the time. And it's sexy: Phoebe Cates reveals her chest to great effect, especially on poor Judge Reinhold. Hollywood learned the wrong lessons from the seminal Fast Times. The teen movie industry that blossomed in its wake told touching stories of early romance, but rarely would a viewer recognize what he saw. The independent Dazed and Confused came the closest. But in general, the movie makers copied the Fast Times surface: show sexy kids in sunny climates triumphing over their own foolishness and some mild adversity. Hey I loved those movies as much as the next guy, but they were not sufficiently challenging. The imitations delivered pleasures but didn't leave an impression and don't hold up. War Games was fun, but Matthew Broderick, like Tom Cruise, is a piece of cardboard. He's a smile in a pair of chinos. Compare them with sweaty Mike Damone in Fast Times. Things just got saccharine.

I recommend Smile, written by Jerry Belson, and directed by Michael Ritchie. A beauty pageant in the California hinterlands. A sophisticated ensemble story about the politics of how to play in rigged games in a small town. It came out in 1975, five years after Patton and seven years before Fast Times.

Smile

Patton and Fast Times

I watched Patton a couple weeks ago. The DVD began with Francis Ford Coppolla on a couch. I had to fast-forward through it, pushing the button, since under the DVD's menu system, the interview was part of the movie itself, not a separate feature. As a result your dense correspondent was made aware, by force, that Francis Ford Coppolla wrote the screenplay. Patton is the triumphal story of a brilliant commander and seems to fit snugly in the camp of movies about great heroes in good wars. But it's also a Coppolla movie and foretells the darker depiction of war in Apocalypse Now. What connects them is insanity. The movie Patton is an absolute nut. He reads Rommel's book on tank battle tactics before going to bed. Looking over a great valley, he hears the explosions from the Carthaginians' brave stand against the Roman legions. Omar Bradley tells him, "I do this because I was trained to do it. You do it because you love it." The movie is full of great lines. During a tank battle, Patton shouts, "Rommel you magnificent bastard. I read your book!" The 1970s were the golden age of great movies about not-great people, and Patton, from 1970, marks the transition, bridging the tough, heroic World War 2 movies like Bridge on the River Kwai with the dark 1970s take seen in Apocalapyse Now or The Deerhunter.

I left Fast Times at Ridgemont High off of my five favorites list earlier this year. I don't know how this happened. I think memory loss and confusion may be side effects of Lunesta. Fast Times was on cable TV a couple weeks ago and it never gets old. The brilliance of Cameron Crowe is his subtle, documentarian's interest in getting the quiet stuff just right. In reference to an old teacher, one teenager says to another, "You had Deegan?" Mike Damone's lines, such as "this is great iced tea!" and "I come here for the strudel," are not funny lines, but they are absolutely right for the character, who is very sharply drawn, as are many others. I've come across others over the years who know every line in the movie. It's a concatenation of episodes and it's remembered for the funny ones and the sexual ones, but what really sets it apart is the artistic freedom given to the writers and actors to create vivid, subtle, realistic characters. An added bonus: Jeff Spicoli has two mostly mute pals. Look closely and they are Eric Stoltz and Anthony Edwards!



Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Widescreen Special Edition)

Five Favorites

On facebook, there's an application called Flixter that asks you to name your ten favorite movies. I did it and nobody noticed. I, however, was pleased with the list so I will reproduce it here, but with commentary, and a shorter tougher to make list. It occurred to me that these favorites are also products, so I've linked to amazon.com for your convenience!

Saturday Night Fever

How can you not like this one? The whole movie rides effortlessly along the seam between guilty-pleasure cheesy entertainment and cinematic glory. The music is cheesy pop but brilliant cheesy pop. The star is a television star in the tradition of David Cassidy but revealed in this movie to be a really good dramatic actor. The plot is a hackneyed dance contest and a hackneyed struggle to overcome class. But the sturdy story does the job: the local dancing talent isn't bad at all. The two-bit pals perfectly set off the star power of the king of the dicso, and the group's desperation is beautifully illustrated in a harrowing action sequence on the Verrizano Bridge . It's a great film from talented, unpretentious director John Badham.

Friday Night Lights

As a football fan, the topic - football is life itself for small-town boys in West Texas - interested me a lot, and I bought the book. But I didn't even get half way through. The kids just didn't come off the page and become three-dimensional people for me. But boy do they in the movie. The boys and the coach really mean it on the field and their home lives are tough too, with embarrassing atypical families, and not a cliche in sight. The action is extremely well-filmed; the football is riveting. The no-stars casting and naturalistic dialog make it feel real, and it's very affecting. And then Tim McGraw, like fellow country musician Dwight Yoakam did in Sling Blade, delivers a tough dose of redneck authenticity.

Dog Day Afternoon

Listen to how people talk in this movie. Look at the rubber in the legs of that pizza man, excited to get onto the evening news, for delivering a pie to bank robbers at work. Look at how a gathering of earnest New Yorkers, some of whom have strayed off the courses prescribed for them, but all of whom are trying to do the humane thing, push each other into impossibly difficult circumstances on a hot day in a tense time on the busy dirty streets of striving, thriving, jiving Brooklyn. Sidney Lumet keeps things ultra-tense, but you get some levity too. I like a little levity.

Broadway Danny Rose

Woody Allen transitioned from great stand-up to funny comedy movies in the late 1960s and 1970s. Annie Hall, Manhattan, and others mixed in poignant commentary, took on some big questions, and wowed the critics, but for me, they weren't great movies. They didn't have plots, drama, characters you cared much about, and they showed a cloying insular world. I became a big fan of Woody's with Broadway Danny Rose. The Danny character is an inspired exaggeration of the characters Woody played in previous movies. He's a joker, a mannered little man, trapped by who he is, nervous, elaborately polite, forever trotting out the trusty conversation starters, and in an original twist, he's an ultra-loyal talent agent, delivering well-intentioned, half-way capable representaion to a group who brings new meaning to the word motley. With an elaborate plot, a nutty mass of blue-collar/gray-market Italian-American characters including a tough tawkin' Mia Farrow, it's the story of a man who can't help being a sentimental fool and his so-called friends, who can't not be who they are either. The movie is framed in a conversation among a group of comics reminiscing about Danny Rose, the legend. The device adds a timeless nostalgic quality to the story, as does the use of black and white film, although the cars and the clothes are pointedly tacky and contemporary.

Poseidon Adventure

Please don't lump this one with The Towering Inferno. Inferno isn't terrible but it feels like a sequel; you can smell a formula afoot right from the start. Poseidon is a big mainstream Hollywood movie too, with its alotment of big stars, has-beens, and up and coming cuties. The difference between the first and second disaster movie is huge though, like the difference between Rocky and Rocky II or Star Wars and Revenge of the Jedi. The actors show it when something big is being taken on for the first time; you can see the rage in their faces and the audience can feel it in their spines. I don't think Gene Hackman is going through the motions when he preaches to newly arrived passengers on a cold and overcast day at the beginning of the film or when he's leading his little party through the pits of hell at the end. Shelley Winters is one of the great actresses of the 20th century and she left it on the field in this one.

On board ship is the world, including a priest, a cop, and a hooker (no joke), plus old people and children. The ship is a marvel, just as you'd guess. But nature has other plans for our little microcosm! The test is harrowing, and the response to it invokes great themes: perseverance, faith, intelligence, sacrifice. It feels historic. It feels biblical. It's a big, juicy drama with a great cast.