Favorite First Watches of September
Those three small words every girl long longs to hear: "rock and roll" (and/or "Shah Rukh Khan")
Times Square (1980)
Director: Allan Moyle
A young woman, Nicky, kneels prostrate on the floor of the recording studio of an FM radio station, her face streaked with tears, which have smudged the black eye mask she has painted on her face, indicating her status as a criminal to society. Into a mic (and over the airwaves) she begs over the strain of her guitar:
“Can you hear me?/Can you feel me out there?/Pammy! I'm callin' you Pammy! Pammy!”
She’s a teenage runaway, calling out to her best friend, Pamela, a fellow runaway (and former trust fund kid) who escaped from the same hospital. After a series of outlandish shenanigans — including befriending a call-in radio DJ (a drawling Tim Curry, as "Johnny LaGuardia") and forming a band called “the Sleaze Sisters”—the two have become folk heroes of a shapeshifting New York City, caught between years of economic downturn and widespread gentrification and decimation of public space. Unfortunately, the same forces that conspire to clean up the city that Nicky and Pamela freely flit about are after them as well. As they scatter about New York City, like particles waiting to settle in a shaken snow globe, they’re living (a colorful) life on their own terms, creating their own (stylish) sense of self. Between adorable musical performances, dancing in nightclubs, poorly robbing people, and generally wrecking havoc, the two attempt to make meaning of their lives and what they want from it, all the while struggling to define themselves outside the labels and interpretations of authority figures. They’re fighting a losing battle: freedom, particularly for young girls, is a fantasy. Times Square is busy being re-imagined, signifying its literal (and spiritual) death as the gathering place for all the undesirable elements that once gave the city its glorious stench. Allegedly based on an anonymous young girl’s diary, which director Allan Moyle claimed to have found between a couch cushion, this terrific cult film is woefully underrated (I blame the generic title), though it was clearly influential on the later riot grrrl movement. The film, shot entirely on location in NYC, gains tremendous strength from the central performances of its young stars, who embody the ethos of the punk rock scene, using it as a framework for the love story coming-of-age narrative at the heart of the story (something very rare for female protagonists). As the girls become enfants terribles of Times Square, finding beauty in its seediness and socioeconomic diversity, they learn that they only really need each other (the film’s not-subtle lesbian subtext was allegedly written out of the film, but…they didn’t do a very good job!) The film's soundtrack includes a number of punk and new wave bangers from the era, as well as original musical performances by Robin Johnson (“feeeeed me!”), who is simply stunning as the scrappy street urchin who reaches for fame, as it's the only way to ensure she can’t be completely erased from this earth. This film is one long music video: overwrought, irreverent, heartbreaking, and cool as hell:
Times Square (1980) is available to rent on digital platforms.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Director: John Cassavetes
What’s my take on Cassavetes? I love this guy’s movies!
What Times Square (1980) does in capturing New York at its grimiest, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) manages for Los Angeles tenfold: never has the city looked so absolutely disgusting and unappealing…hostile, dingy, and void of feeling. Cassavetes’ bestie Ben Gazzara, one of the greatest character actors of all time, leads this riveting pseudo-neo-noir about a nightclub owner whose gambling addiction puts him in a bind: unable to pay off his considerable debts with the mob and at risk of losing his Sunset Strip topless club, he’s ordered by gangsters to kill “a Chinese bookie” (who may or may not be the leader of a dangerous Chinese triad, making the order a potentially fatal task that’s seemingly impossible to accomplish). A spiritual predecessor to Uncut Gems (2019), the film depicts Gazzara as a man living on borrowed time, whose preoccupations — such as the artistic direction of his strip club and his romance with a young black dancer — are so stunningly myopic in the face of his precarious situation that you can’t help but feel a little bad for the guy. “I'm only happy when I'm angry,” Gazzara’s character admits. “When I'm sad, when I can play the fool...when I can be what people want me to be rather than be myself.” The film’s cult has arisen alongside the reputation of its director, whose work is now regarded as the very best of American independent cinema. Which version of the film is the “right” one to watch, however, is a matter of debate. We watched the 108-minute cut from 1978, which differs from the original 1976 theatrical version (135 minutes); Gazzara apparently so disliked the original cut, finding it too long, that it motivated Cassavetes to produce the shorter cut, which is the version that tends to be in circulation. Even at 108 minutes, the film feels complete, as if we’ve spent a full night in the underworld with this man, gorging on his misfortune.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) is streaming on [HBO] Max and The Criterion Channel.
Don (2006)
Director: Farhan Akhtar
This month, Vince and I hauled our cookies to the Regal Essex for a very inconveniently timed screening of Jawan (2023), the second record-breaking Bollywood release starring Shah Rukh Khan to come out this year; Pathaan (2023), was released in January (we also saw it in theaters and had an incredible time at both). As of this writing, Jawan is set to become the highest grossing Bollywood film of all time, surpassing the record previously set by Pathaan earlier this year; a third film, Dunki, set to come out in December, could potentially perform similarly. TheWrap sums it up nicely for us: “SRK might release three movies in one year that end up becoming the first, second and third-biggest Bollywood films ever. That’s movie stardom on an unheard-of scale…considering Bollywood’s recent box office slump, SRK is almost single-handedly keeping it in the game.” Bollywood has been in existential freefall since the groundbreaking success of RRR (2022) out of “Tollywood” (Telugu language cinema), yet suddenly here we are. At 57, is Shah Rukh Khan — the so-called “King of Bollywood”—one of the last great international superstars? After Jawan, we were desperate for more SRK, the handsome and effortlessly charming actor who rose to Bollywood stardom in the 90s playing heartthrobs (and baddies) before becoming one of the most recognizable faces of Hindi-language cinema across the globe (a Mr. Worldwide, if you will). Although Indian cinema can still be prohibitively difficult to find streaming with English subtitles, many of SRK’s Bollywood films are blessedly available on Netflix and Amazon Prime, including Don (2006), the mega-successful remake of the Amitabh Bachchan-starring 1978 film of the same name about a super-criminal who continuously defies the odds to escape capture and censure (“Catching Don is not only hard...it's impossible!”) Living with a straight white male, as I do, it’s harder to get them to sit through romantic classics—like Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994) or Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)—than it is to get them to watch a blockbuster action film where Shah Rukh Khan does a Face/Off, more or less. So we watched Don, in which SRK plays the notorious, titular Don, as well as a hapless cop who happens to look exactly like him (you can imagine where it goes from here). The star—who, by the way, only looks better with age—is one of those great multi-faceted performers who can just do it all. Fight? SRK. Dance? SRK. Fall in love? SRK. Play characters that look identical but act as polar opposites? That’s Don. Also starring Priyanka Chopra at the height of her Bollywood career, this dizzying film is full of delights, particularly a hypnotizing disco-infused number that personally brought me a lot of joy. Even at a near three hour run time (typical for Indian cinema), there’s just no denying Don: after all, “People don't leave Don...they leave the world.”
Don (2006) is streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972)
Director: Adrian Maben
Sometimes I struggle to “get” Pink Floyd, in that I’m rarely in the kind of state of mind that compliments the freeform quality of their music (or, if I am in that state of mind, I tend to gravitate towards slightly harsher vibes). But I have to say: watching them perform in an empty amphitheater on the ruins of Pompeii from the comfort of my living room couch was a pretty singularly great experience. Conceived by director Adrian Maben as an answer to prior concert films like Woodstock (1970), in which the camera devotes equal time to performer and concertgoer, this film depicts the band performing for an audience of no one. The film was shot over the course of four days at the Amphitheater of Pompeii, a structure that was built around 70 BC and is one of the oldest surviving Roman amphitheaters, despite its burial by fire in 79 AD. The intimacy of the cameras employed to capture the band in the process of creation contrasts nicely with the vast liminal space of the amphitheater, lending the concert a truly spooky feeling: they’re performing for an army of ghosts on the burial grounds of a lost civilization, buried under the fury of Vesuvius. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As the band cycles through a number of songs from prior albums like A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) and Meddle (1971), the viewer can’t help but be captivated by the seamless marriage of set and sound (particularly given that certain sequences were later shot at a Paris television studio). It’s a stunning audiovisual experiment that exists in many forms: for a later 1974 release, footage of the band tooling Dark Side of the Moon (1973) was inserted to further pad the film. But I like the lean intimacy of the 1972 cut: passing from day to night to day, it unfolds like an ambient dream. “Are you not entertained?” Roger Waters seems to ask, while demonstrating how the group’s prog rock style represented the antithesis of all that was accessible in mainstream rock of the late 60s/early 70s. Ironically, the band’s volcanic success was just around the corner…
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972) can be watched on Youtube.
Duel (1971)
Director: Steven Spielberg
When will septuagenarian auteur Steven Spielberg return to his car cinema roots? Originally shot as a television film for ABC, Duel (1971), the director’s stunning (and deceptively simple) feature directorial debut, helped the young fableman pivot from television work to real filmmaking; he secured the directing job after showing producer George Eckstein a cut of his then-unaired Columbo episode "Murder By the Book," which would debut months before Duel. Following the success of the latter broadcast, Universal packaged the film for theatrical release, employing Spielberg to shoot new sequences that padded out the film’s runtime and gave it less of a “broadcast” feel. Duel tells the story of a businessman who—while driving through the desert — is stalked and terrorized by the unseen driver of a giant, menacing truck. Beautifully composed and thrillingly paced with that signature Spielbergian tension, you can already see the director's flawless style practically perfected, preparing him for his next (car) feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), which is also excellent. Duel is a film that uses the mundane rigor of every day life as the site of true horror, and if you’ve ever driven in L.A., you’ll know the dread of the never-ending commute, when the passage of physical space and time feels particularly abstracted. Haters will say it’s just Jaws with a big scary truck, but…it’s Jaws with a big scary truck! I really dug how natural the conflation of driver / truck becomes through the course of the film; eventually, you almost forget there is a driver, feeling as though the man is being haunted by a terrifying mechanical beast.
Duel (1971) is streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Stop Making Sense (1984)
Director: Jonathan Demme
If, after watching Times Square, you too feel the urge to dance down the street while David Byrne screams “This ain’t no party! This ain’t no disco! This ain’t no foolin’ around!” over the greatest beat you’ve ever heard, have I got a film for you: Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads concert film, which is currently enjoying a re-release courtesy of A24. Widely regarded as one of the greatest concert films of all time, it’s hard to articulate the awesome power that this film contains: lean and tightly choreographed, shot through with an electrical current. Filmed over the course of four shows at Hollywood's Pantages Theater in December 1983—in support of the band’s fifth studio album, Speaking in Tongues—the film/concert is basically a musical retrospective of the band's work to that point, beginning with their breakout 1977 hit "Psycho Killer." Unlike other concert films, there's very little footage of the actual audience watching the show, as Demme decided against shooting the crowd; instead, the viewer is kept captive by Byrne, who slowly brings more and more members of the Talking Heads onstage with him as the night goes on, intimate and electric. He’s magnetic: an alien street preacher running through the gamut of human expressions and sounds, as if to test them all out. He jogs in place, he runs in circles, he traverses the stage; he’s big, he’s small, he’s a total dork— and cute as a button! He’s possessed by some anarchic cosmic energy here, and Demme’s sharp camera captures it all. Slick, lean, and cinematic, the film works in tandem with the show, framing the brilliant performers (including a sensational vocal performance by singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, who perform practically the entire concert). A total cult classic, the film has been invariably unavailable until now, with the 4K restoration and theatrical re-release in honor of the film’s 40th anniversary. Go see it! Do not resist the urge to dance in your aisle.
Stop Making Sense (1984) is currently in theaters in both standard and IMAX formats.
