A movie that makes you cry.
I’m not a big crier (when it comes to movies, haha) but I cried both times I’ve watched “Pele” with my sons. When the teenage soccer superstar leads Brazil over Sweden in the finals and Pele’s father and mother cry with joy back at their local club in Brazil — oh my god I can’t stop the tears. Thinking what one person can do, and how deeply parents can love a child — it’s a very beautiful moment. Great film by the way. My kids LOVE it.
A movie that freaks you out.
“Bad Lieutenant” is one of my favorites — Abel Ferrara ‘s one masterpiece and Harvey Keitel‘s most raw and wounded performance. It freaks me out only in its realization of what it was going to take for them to get the film they wanted. Only through total excess, willing self-immolation, free falling toward a bottomless descent — the realization that THAT is what it takes to make great art. You have to be willing to go dark — to go mad — to go all the way. Everything about that film is the filmmakers’ acceptance of stone cold abandon.
A movie you love that no would expect you to love.
When I get depressed, my sister is always like, “God is it a ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ moment or what?” She’s right on. “St. Elmo’s Fire” is such a great thing when you need it. It’s like a bistro burger from Corner Bistro in the West Village. Pure comfort. Brat Pack!
A defining coming of age film.
When we got our first VCR, we rented a double feature from Village Video of “Taps” and “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” — totally covers the teen boy gamut. But, truly, anything I feel about coming of age is in “Pavilion.”
A movie that defined your childhood.
The school bus scene in “Sixteen Candles” and the quarry scene in “Breaking Away” are pretty much definitive of my childhood. The bus was such a hilarious, chaotic and painful ecosystem and John Hughes nails it perfectly. “Breaking Away” was the opposite — and what sticks with me most from that movie is Dennis Quaid at the quarry, like “Ode to Billy Joe” and “The Outsiders” — small town existentialism, a sense of genuine beauty and intimacy surrounding a bottomless hole.
A movie that made me fall in love with cinema.
Again, too many to count, but Andrei Tarkovsky‘s “Mirror” came to me at a time when I was living away from home, was relatively lonely, it was before I had made a single film but was becoming a serious cinephile, and it felt limitless in its poetic visual expression. It was as personal as a film could be — the subject matter his parents’ divorce, his father’ poetry as narration — which transformed the image, camera movement, and montage into something sensual, something spiritual, something truly alive. His understanding of and ability to capture the intertwined relationship between nature and people is breathtaking and unparalleled. The final scene, the kids running through the trees as the sun bleeds gold, their grandmother walking behind, the camera floating impossibly…literally magnificent.
“Dark Night” is out now in limited release.