15 Awesome Under-The-Radar Films by Great Directors: Part III
5. Minnie and Moskowitz, John Cassavetes. “If you think of yourself as funny, you become tragic,” goes a line in John Cassavetes’ “Minnie and Moskowitz” and when the moment arrives, it practically knocks the wind out of you. “Minnie and Moskowitz” is one of the director’s unsung masterworks, a piercingly honest and terribly funny study of two damaged souls who might be good news for each other and are pretty much bad news for everyone else. By this time, Cassavetes had already written the blueprint for what would eventually become the language of American independent cinema, and had also released a few bonafide D.I.Y. classics, particularly his jazzy debut “Shadows” — the influence of which can be seen in everything from Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” to early rap music videos — and also “Faces,” his pitiless look at a marriage in freefall. But “Minnie and Moskowitz” earns points for being unassuming: like its principal characters, a pair of hot-tempered love birds played by Cassavetes regulars Gena Rowlands (the director’s wife and muse) and Seymour Cassell, “Minnie and Moskowitz” is sentimental, sloppy, profane and unapologetic. It also unabashedly asks to be loved, and through its dogged earnestness and Mr. Cassavetes’ astonishing empathy for his characters, the movie earns that love. In terms of modern equivalents, think David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” for the free love era, but substituting that movie’s Capra-esque sentimentality and contrivance-strewn third act for something rough, raw and jagged. Like all of Cassavetes’ films, “Minnie and Moskowitz” is about the roiling chaos that lurks beneath the surface of everyday interactions, and in this case, it’s also a portrait of how two broken people find a home in each other’s arms. This is a movie you want to reach out and touch. I almost had to include “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” — Mr. Cassavetes’ fantastic, slow-burning crime film starring Ben Gazarra, whose used car lots and all-night Sunset Strip diners recall the SoCal squalor of something like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights”. But “Minnie and Moskowitz” won out for me — it’s a movie with heart, as well as fist, guts and a head full of steam. Seek it out however you can.
4. The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh. If for some reason Steven Soderbergh’s defiantly eccentric comic procedural “The Informant!” gets discovered by college students some twenty to thirty years down the line, (you never know, it could happen) I can see a fun drinking game being built around it. Take a shot for every time it looks like Matt Damon’s hero might not be telling the truth. I’d wager that most the participants would be shitfaced before the 45-minute mark. As it stands, I find “The Informant!” to be one of Mr. Soderbergh’s wisest, funniest and most horribly misunderstood films: a wry, entangled dance in duplicity and high-stakes white collar crime that breezes along to the carefree sounds of an island-influenced Marvin Hamlisch score. Matt Damon gives the performance of a lifetime as Mark Whitacre, a genial corporate drone-turned-whistleblower whose loyalties shifts when he learns of shady misdoings at the highest levels of his parent company. As he finds himself increasingly mired in deception and treachery, Mark displays a consistent inability to tell the truth: to the FBI, to his wife, to anybody. Damon’s astonishing confidence in his own sense of delusional righteousness gives “The Informant!” an air of mannered and often deliriously funny black comedy: often, when someone is trying to warn Mark of the potentially dangerous nature of his plans, his mind will tune out and Damon’s aw-shucks voiceover will dominate the track as Mark ruminates about corn, polar bears and the banal surface qualities of everyone he encounters. I wouldn’t blame most folks for not really knowing what to make of “The Informant!” — Soderbergh has never, to his credit, been interested in meeting the audience halfway. And yet I’ve found that if you surrender yourself to the movie’s kooky wavelength and allow yourself to dig into the basically terrifying nature of Damon’s performance, that “The Informant!” is one of Soderbergh’s most memorable pictures.
3. Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch. Jim Jarmusch is a man in love with the midnight hour: when all the shiftless drunks are stumbling home from the local watering hole and the off-key music of human conversation fills the air, bouncing off the walls and through the alleyways of whatever city his films inhabit. His first three features are practically an unofficial trilogy about deadpan drifters seeking meaning in the mundane margins of America. “Stranger than Paradise” remains the archetype of independent-minded cool and “Down by Law” is pretty much a perfect movie, a lowlife fairy tale that’s as dark as diner coffee. These films unfold on the largely deserted freeways of the American Midwest and the bayous and prison cells of New Orleans respectively, but they also take place in the director’s imagination. Jarmusch is in love with the shabby, forgotten backroads of America, and all of his movies are a testament to travel being good for the soul. “Mystery Train,” the third in the aforementioned trilogy, is one of Jarmusch’s funniest and most soulful pictures, and one that’s rarely mentioned in the same breath (for whatever reason) as his early, genre-defining work. It’s a love letter to the city of Memphis, and to the music scene in particular — mainly the parade of train-hoppers, pool sharks, fast-talking barbers and fall-down drunks that dwells in the city’s less reputable corners, with much of the action centering around a ruined old hotel run by none other than Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The gallery of rogues is classic Jarmusch: rockabilly-loving Japanese teenagers, the ghost of Elvis Presley, Spike Lee’s brother as an incompetent bellhop. As always, Jarmusch is in love with irony and invention and the tiny, but tender poetry of ordinary human interaction. “Mystery Train” might be on the languid side for someone unfamiliar with the director’s work, but fans will welcome the movie’s patient pace, droll humor and pitch-perfect rhythm and blues soundtrack.
2. The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese. When “The King of Comedy” was released in 1982, I think it’s safe to say that most critics and audiences didn’t really know what to make of it. It was generally perceived as a sour, morally ambiguous “comedy” that featured a delusional and dangerous loser as its hero and whose plot hinged on the proposed kidnapping of a daytime talk show host. More than thirty years later, “The King of Comedy” isn’t just one of director Martin Scorsese’s most lacerating and painful movies, (which is really saying something) it’s also a frighteningly prescient look at the callow hunger for celebrity that has come to define the face of American pop culture well into the 21st century. It’s, actually, frighteningly easy to think the movie’s protagonist, Rupert Pupkin, occupying the same pushy crowds of desperate Big Apple hustlers as a slick huckster like Satan’s very own special minion Donald Trump. The film is also a bone-dry ribbing of contemporary cultural relevance that exposes the ugly flip-side of our nation’s relentlessly upbeat ‘can do’ mentality. As Pupkin, an unbalanced reptilian goon who stages interviews with cardboard cutouts of Johnny Carson in his mother’s basement, Deniro gives a chilling performance — he’s like the less capable little brother of Travis Bickle, all empty stares and bland hostility, but without the aspirations to homicidal martyrdom. The film is a bitter pill to swallow for sure, and maybe not in the realm of a ‘Scorsese film’ as we come to think of it — you know, gangsters, sex, cocaine, guilt, Jesus and all that good stuff — but as the years have gone by, it remains one of the director’s most enduring and unusually satisfying pictures.
And finally, number one…
Amarcord, Federico Fellini. Federico Fellini may never live down the reputation of “8 ½,“ his phantasmagoric magnum opus that was derided as bloated and self-indulgent upon its release and has since accrued masterpiece status, inspiring generations of navel-gazing film students to create their own unhinged dream narratives. There’s also “La Dolce Vita,” his scabrous and sprawling attack on Rome’s decadent elites that also indulges in the opulence of the society it happens to be critiquing. He’s made plenty of other beguiling and brilliant pictures — his wistful coming-of-age memoir “I Vitelloni,” for instance, or the rococo kaleidoscope of color and movement that makes up “Juliet of the Spirits”. And yet those seeking the ultimate Fellini experience — his evocation of humanity’s wandering parade, his flair for the grotesque and the absurd, plus his affinity for women with hourglass figures and too much make-up on —should know that all these elements are on display in the director’stender and ridiculous human comedy “Amarcord,” a Roman neologism for “I Remember,” which chronicles the inhabitants of a seaside village, Borgo San Giuliano (near the walls of Rimini) during the fascist regime of Mussolini. Fear and violence lurks around the edges of Fellini’s exuberant, visually ravishing farce, but the mood, as always, is celebratory. The film is practically brimming with life, and also with scatological gags, curvaceous women and the wistful score of Nina Rota, whose mournful marches will probably always be associated with Fellini’s films. See it, if for no other reason, for the heavenly scene of a peacock spreading its wings in the snow: a vision of the art and beauty that exists right before our eyes. It’s gorgeous, inexplicable and lingers with you — as does “Amarcord”.
Thanks for reading!
