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Could you describe the ruckus, sir?

The cinetrix has been blindsided. You see, on March 24, 1984, five students served Saturday detention at Shermer High School. Which means that The Breakfast Club is now TWENTY YEARS OLD.

To observe this milestone, the Independent reconsiders the oeuvre of the auteur of adolescence, John Hughes. [via GreenCine]

To borrow Tom Wolfe's description of Phil Spector, John Hughes was the "tycoon of teen". Throughout the Eighties, Hughes directed a clutch of films that both defined and celebrated what it meant to be young in that decade. Like Spector, he operated in a genre that was generally considered superficial and banal, and, like Spector, he transcended the genre to create a body of work that was exuberant, exhilarating and revealing. With films such as Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, John Hughes made stars of what came to be known as the "Brat Pack" - Matthew Broderick, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez and the flame-haired teen temptress Molly Ringwald.

Hughes's films often featured these same actors, and all were set in the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois. Where Thomas Hardy had Wessex, Hughes had Shermer, and the town's geography connects all of his work: Del Griffin from Planes, Trains and Automobiles lives two doors from Samantha Baker (of Sixteen Candles fame), who knows Ferris Bueller, who went to Shermer High School - as do the characters in The Breakfast Club. The word "auteur" may usually be reserved for film-makers such as Bergman and Godard, but John Hughes was the auteur of adolescence, and The Breakfast Club was his finest moment.

One of the great injustices of the cinetrix's teen years was not being allowed to see The Breakfast Club in the theatre [it was playing at the Queen Anne, so I had to drive past it every day on the way to and from school] because it was rated R. Mom*, I might have been an investment broker by now, if only you had let me get this whole movie phase out of my system.

*In fairness, my mom and I watched flicks together--like Sid & Nancy and My Beautiful Laundrette [a doomed British romances double feature!]--all the time when I was young, and she still sees more movies than I do now by exploiting her local interlibrary loan system.

Art & Multiplexes

Two new monthly online film columns debut this month.

In Beyond the Multiplex at Salon, Andrew O'Hehir advances this theory, "pretty much untested, that all arty, indie-type films made in the last 15 years or so in America and Western Europe fall into one of two categories: Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch."

And over at Film Comment's site, you'll find ART & INDUSTRY, Amy Taubin's column on indie film. This month, Taubin takes a closer look at Shane Carruth's Primer, which won the Grand Prize at Sundance 2004 as well as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's $20,000 award for films dealing with science and technology.

Smells like pseudospirits

Dave "I'm No. 4, I try harder" Kehr reviews Scooby Deux for the Times this week without once mentioning how the Velma vitamin was replaced with the Mystery Machine back in the day [draw your own conclusions as to why]. Elvis would have devoted the lede to that, man.

Speaking of Mitchell, Kehr bites his style in the ratings advisory, a feeble attempt to enter the corporation limits of Coolsville.

"Scooby-Doo 2" is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested) for some dimly frightening situations, some gross humor and at least one covert drug reference. (Keep your nose out of those aerosol cans, Shaggy!)

Covert? Um, Dave? Two words: Scooby Snacks.

Taking one for the team

Over at wsj.com [subscription required], some poor guy named Jonathan Wolf parses Tarantino's chop-socky opus for us.

FIRST-HALF MAYHEM
Here's a casualty list for Kill Bill: Vol. 1, picked up in one careful viewing.

Knife Impalement 1
Tongue Ripped Out/
Face Mutilated 1
Shotgun Deaths 9
Head Slammed in Door 1
Gunshots to Head 3
Ripping Face Off 1
Side of Head
Impaled With Nails 1
Pair of Eyes Ripped
From Face 1
Impaled by Thrown Hatchets 2
Scalping 1
Slashed/
Impaled by Sword 46
Decapitations 3
Total Number of Deaths 70

If you want to see what or who is on the Bride's to-do list now, Part the Second opens April 16.

Leave death to the professionals.

George has posted a new essay, Three by Carol Reed, over at A Girl with a Gun. The cinetrix is reading it slowly so it will last longer. There's some especially nice writing about the role of Vienna in The Third Man. Here's a taste.

The real story is about Vienna, and so it was in the movie. This is not a story about a man who comes looking for a friend, but about a city in which a man comes looking for a friend, to his despair loses him, then to his greater despair finds him. But the despair arises less from the circumstances of losing and find, than from the city in which that takes place. The war is still here in Vienna, in a way it had never reached America and which England—although in 1948 still experiencing substantial deprivation—had in some measure escaped. There are shortages of practically everything—food, electricity, jobs, freedom, dignity. Most people will do anything to get by; a few will go farther, grab the few chances at great fortune that exist, no matter the cost to others. Everything here is in and of a city at an historical watershed, and by encouraging that story to come out from within, the film outgrew its thriller origins.

Most of the interesting settings are either location shots within the city (the cemetery, the Prater amusement park and wheel, the street where Harry was “killed,” the café where the trap for Harry is set, the huge fields of rubble, the sewers) or, if sets, are still convincingly a part of Vienna: Anna’s dressing room at the Josefstadt theater, Harry’s old apartment overlooking the site of the “accident,” Anna’s apartment, where the window opens out onto the street where Holly sees Harry in the doorway. Many of the scenes shot at night return to the techniques of Odd Man Out and the one night sequence of The Fallen Idol, deep shadows and shiny pavements, lights throwing images of a running man on an alley wall. (In Vienna, no small part of Reed’s budget went for getting hoses hooked up to working hydrants and mains to wet down the streets and walls.)

Mmmmm...rain-slicked streets at night. Cue zither music.

Gleam like custom rims on an Escalade

It's Friday, and that means it's time for Elvis Mitchell's latest ratings advisory.

"Never Die Alone" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has elements of the thug-life demimonde: violence, drugs, strong language and adult sexuality.

Holla!

Camp

So I watched Sundance '03 audience favorite Camp over the weekend, and it's stuck with me. Not just because the cinetrix is a sucker for "Hey, kids. Let's put on a show!" narratives [she is], or musicals [guilty], or summer camp movies [two words, Little Darlings], or the improbable triumph of misfit, smart-mouthed kids in the charge of surly alcoholics [see also, Bad News Bears]. Or even because I've had the opening number, "How Shall I See You Through My Tears?" from the Gospel at Colonnus riccocheting around my teeming brain ever since [you see, the girl who sings it has a voice like Lauryn Hill if she'd never lost her shit. Click on the title and hear for yourself].

The thing is, Camp, like its characters, is deeply flawed. There's too much muchness crammed in there, and the sense of a writer-director shoehorning in all the stuff he's been wanting to film for so long is ever present. But somehow every overdetermined thing about it--the biracial drag queen, the real-sized girls, an appearance by Stephen Sondheim as himself [he's mobbed]--coheres in such a way that you just feel good about forgiving its manifold sins. It's the cinematic equivalent of buying your overpriced produce from a CSA. There's no nice way to say it: You, the viewer, root.

And, for a movie set at a musical theatre camp, it makes truly jarring nondiegetic soundtrack choices. I mean, would you expect a film that prominently features a bunch of pubescent musical theatre geeks belting out "The Ladies Who Lunch" to set its two male leads' earnest discussion about one's homosexuality to the Replacements' "Skyway?" A film made in this decade? Me neither. And I'm not even going to touch the inclusion of the freakin' Wonder Stuff....

Here's the weirdest thing, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. The plot, such as it is, pivots on the effect that flirtatious, people-pleasing Vlad, the all-too-rare straight boy at camp, has on the fragile drag queens and nascent fag hags alike. Which is to say, it's the first movie I've ever seen where the magical negro is a straight, white, pretty boy.

Don't look so shocked. You know what I'm talking about. Like The Green Mile?

The WaPo ran a great article about the tired trope in 2003.

"[Filmmakers] give the black character special powers and underlying mysticism," says Todd Boyd, author of "Am I Black Enough for You?" and co-writer of the 1999 film "The Wood." "This goes all the way back to 'Gone with the Wind.' Hattie McDaniel is the emotional center, but she is just a pawn. Pawns help white people figure out what's going wrong and fix it, like Whoopi Goldberg's psychic in 'Ghost.' "

It isn't that the actors or the roles aren't likable, valuable or redemptive, but they are without interior lives. For the most part, they materialize only to rescue the better-drawn white characters. Sometimes they walk out of the mists like Will Smith's angelic caddy in "The Legend of Bagger Vance." Thanks to Vance, the pride of Savannah (Matt Damon) gets his "authentic swing" back.

Seriously, that's exactly what happens. Still, if you're looking for a little more narrative arc and a lot less melisma than "American Idol" has on offer, watch Camp. I bet you tear up.

CineWomen Screening Series

LA readers, please take note.

The "Queen of Indies," director Allison Anders, will kick of the CineWomen Screening Series at the Charlie Chaplin Theater with a tribute to Sarah Jacobson, aka the "DIY Queen" and "Queen of Underground Cinema."

April 2nd, 2004 - 7:00 PM
Raleigh Studios, Charlie Chaplin Theater
5300 Melrose Avenue
Co-Hosted by CineWomen and The First Weekenders Group
$8.00 CineWomen, $10.00 Non-Members

"I Was a Teenage Serial Killer" (1993) (30 min., B&W) Mary is a young woman who gets fed up with being mistreated by men and decides to take matters into her own hands. A decade before "Monster," Film Threat voted this groundbreaking film one of the "Top 25 Underground Films of All Time."

"Mary Jane's Not A Virgin Anymore" (feature, color) is an explosive look at girls having sex and what they have to say about it. Seventeen year-old Mary Jane works at the coolest art-house movie theater in her Midwestern town where she wants to become as hip and worldly as her older co-workers, but she just can't seem to get it right. Especially when it comes to boys and sex. Uncut, uncensored, and unashamed, Mary Jane finally learns to deal with men and sex on her own terms.

About Sarah Jacobson [from the First Weekenders Group]:

Sarah Jacobson, whose feature film "Mary Jane's Not A Virgin Anymore" screened at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, died in February in New York City after a battle with cancer. Beyond the attention she received for that movie, Sarah led a DIY ("Do It Yourself") movement in the 1990s, promoting and distributing her own work with her producer and mom, Ruth Ellen Jacobson, speaking at festivals and events everywhere, and writing about film for a number of publications. A tireless, at times even shameless, promoter of her own work, Sarah was also a passionate advocate for the films of fellow filmmakers.

Born in 1971 in Minneapolis, Sarah Jacobson was a boisterous, funny, opinionated, energetic, confrontational, and caring presence in the film community. At festivals and parties, whether during a seminar or within a small group, she would often provoke conversations and debates about topics including
movies, music, masturbation, Molly Ringwald, and men. "We're gonna fuck shit up!," she would often exclaim loudly and with a big smile, to the dismay of some and the joy of many.

Please consider celebrating a life of fucking shit up. [If nothing else, Allison Anders is one of the most charismatic, tattooed earth mamas you will ever meet. She's got the gift of talking to you as though you're the only person in the room.]

Slow news day

Lloyd Grove calls 65-year-old Rex Reed to task for writing an error-riddled review of the Irish film Intermission, which appeared in last week's Observer. Man, Grove doesn't care whose toes he steps on.

"When I got back to New York I had pages and pages of notes copied from press packets and menus and pieces of paper, and sometimes I just wrote from that verbatim," Reed explained. "You know how many movies I've seen since then? Hundreds!"

Reed continued: "In this case, it was pretty difficult for me to understand. I was writing all of this from napkins stained with chocolate. I think I was eating a Dove bar in the theater. I was really reaching back into my brain to try to remember what it was all about.

"This movie is playing three blocks from where I live, but I really didn't want to see it again."

"You know what? Maybe I should change my whole review and say, 'I don't like this movie at all.'

I'm no fan of Reed's, but as far as I can tell he's being chastized for not working off the press kit. Bad, bad reviewer. Doesn't the Observer have fact-checkers? Or access to IMDb? Next thing you know Grove will be telling us that Countdown to Bliss is a pack of lies, too. "But, but, they seemed so--happy!"

Really, Lloyd. Step off, bitch. Leave picking on film reviewers to the cinetrix. This is your first warning. There won't be a second.

In lieu of a thousand words

His eyes follow you around the room.