Where do I find a great movie?

"Where does he get all those wonderful toys?" This quote from Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Tim Burton's 1989 stylish Batman film came amusingly to my mind as I read a comment on my blogsite. The comment was in response to a piece I wrote about some obscure, independent films such as Mulholland Drive, Elephant, and the Royal Tenenbaums. The comment's composer earnestly asked me where he/she (sorry, I don't know your gender)may obtain these and other independent/foreign film titles. Since Blockbusters are closing down ubiquitously, it will be hard to find these titles for rent. I would, however, try any Blockbuster that is open first. They have a wide array of both independent and foreign films. Another avenue might be the internet. I don't have an Ipod and am not tech-savvy like my commenter, but I believe there are libraries of films you can download to either a desktop, laptop, or Ipod (or any other I-device)from resources to be found online. I cannot give you specific sites, you will have to search for them. If you really want to be bold and just buy it blindly (and cheaply, mind you), you can go to any Movie Stop (their selection is enormous), Best Buy, or F.Y.E (in the mall, they have many used DVDs and for cheap prices). Red Box won't really help because they are predominantly new releases. Another cogent option is to try HBO on demand. They have many films, old and new and independent, for only $2.99 or less to rent. Many are even free! Their menus are easy to navigate through and they even separate films by genre.

What I can do, what I am educated enough to advise you on, is what titles to seek out. Let's start with David Lynch. This is an odd man, but what a brilliant visionary, what a skewed intellect! Start with Blue Velvet from 1986. It's brilliant, iconic opening montage of Americana is a metaphor for the Reagan era. Outwardly, its all roses, blue skies,and smiling faces, but behind that seemingly innocuous facade, was a surreptitous upwelling of anger and malfeasance from the country's malcontents (represented by the ants in the opening montage).This seedy underbelly of American society is what is brilliantly explored, albeit to an almost surreal degree, by Lynch in his acclaimed masterpiece. He creates such frightening, indelible images and draws brilliant performances from his cast, especially from Dennis Hopper.

The sweeter, more humane side of Lynch can be found in his other masterful films, the Elephant Man and the Straight Story. The former, from 1980, is a poignant, beautiful film about the real life personage of John Merrick, hideously deformed from birth, but with a soul deeper, more unfathomable, than the biggest ocean trench. John Hurt is absolutely brilliant in the role. It is not easy to convey emotions under all that makeup, yet he does it with a grace and pathos that is astonishing. There are other great performances too by Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft and the black-and-white cinematography is amazing. The latter, made in 1999, is another true story of a old man who one day decides to ride his tractor across many states to see his brother. The tractor's pace is languid, but the film's isn't. It is heartwarming and it contains another briliant lead performance by 80-plus year-old Richard Farnsworth who invests such dignity into this character. Incidentally, not too long ago, Mr. Farnsworth shot himself with his rifle, stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger, because he was dying of cancer and did not want a long, drawn out death. He had been in the movie business a long time, starting as a stuntman and then progressing into acting. He earned, as did John Hurt for the Elephant Man, a richly deserved Academy Award nomination for his work here. He was a stoic man,a modern-day John Wayne. They don't make men like him anymore, a true icon of cinema.

Next, I will discuss another giant of independent cinema, Gus Van Sant. He first came on the scene with 1989's Drugstore Cowboy featuring a magnificent Matt Dillon in the lead role. The film follws him and his cronies as they rob drug stores to feed their addictions. It is set in the 1970s and the attention to detail, the art direction, is unequivocally authentic. As usual with Van Sant, you get ubiquitous visual flourishes such as moving clouds, odd angles, and other surreal imagery. I think it is one of the best films of the 80s and Roger Ebert considers Dillon's work here one of the best screen performances ever. Other notable films by Van Sant are My Own Private Idaho from 1991 and Milk from 2008. The former contains an absolutely remarkable performance by the late River Phoenix. He was my generation's James Dean. The pathos he invests into the role of the narcoleptic street hustler (yes, that's right) Mikey is a true acting lesson for any aspiring actor. He takes an impossible and seemingly unlikeable character and makes him mesmerizing from start to finish. His sidekick in his adventures is played, in an absolutely great performance, by Keanu Reeves. These two are electric together! Van Sant's screenplay defies description. For the sake of brevity (and clarity), I will call it a road movie. But believe me, every inch of that road is paved with sorrow, regret, happiness, and a deep-rooted sense of what America should be, what is was, and the huge, heartbreaking disparity between the two. The latter Van Sant film, Milk, is easily accessible. It is the true story of the gay activist Harvey Milk. It is his life story. Sean Penn's performances defies adjectives. He is consistently the most briliant and versatile actor working in films today, alongside of Daniel Day-Lewis. He embodies Milk, he loses himself in this man's fight for equal rights for the gay community. His perspicacity and resilience in the face of adversity brilliantly shines through Penn's performance. This is Van Sant's most personal film, being a gay man and filmmaker. He makes us care so deeply about this man and his plight. This is truly an amazing film, one of the best, if not the best of that year.

I could go on endlessly about different filmmakers, but this last section will discuss foreign films. I will start with one of my favorite filmmakers, Akira Kurosawa. He is one of the masters of cinema, a guiding influence on some of the greatest and most successful filmmakers today such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas -the latter most directly. Kurosawa's 1957 film, the Hidden Fortress, directly inspired Lucas' Star Wars. All the characters are there- a princess,a knight, and two bumbling, antagonistic sidekicks, one small and fat and the other tall and thin (R2D2 AND C3P0). It is a very enjoyable film. His true masterpieces, though, are Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Rashomon, Sanjuro, Kagemusha, and Ran. Kurosawa was the most western of Asian filmmakers and was uniformly criticized for it by his contemporaries. His films are Western in conception and he was a vocal proponent of John Ford and his seminal Western films with John Wayne. And where Ford had his leading man, so did Kurosawa. His star was the incomparable Toshiro Mifune and their filmmaking partnership is the most fecund ever in the history of cinema (and routinely voted so by critics around the world). His most infuential films are Seven Samurai which was remade in America as the Magnificent Seven, Sanjuro was remade with Clint Eastwood in the "Man with no name" spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone, and Rashomon, which tells about a rape from several points of view. This latter tactic has been repeated ad nauseum in American movies, most recently with the immensely popular The Hangover. Mifune is brilliant in all these films. His versitality and talent knew no bounds. He has been routinely, and rightfully, called the Japanese Marlon Brando.

Kurosawa's most heartbraking film, and his best in my opinion, is Ikiru from 1952. It is about a dying bureaucrat whose spends his remaining days trying to get a playground built in a lugubrious district in Japan. His story is told in flashbacks and the ending shot of the film, as staged by Kurosawa, is one of the most brilliant in all of cinema-it made me cry. His later masterpieces are Kagemusha from 1980 and Ran from 1985. The former is about how a common thief, who is a doppelganger for the dead emperor, is forced to stand in for the deceased by the emperor's inner circle. It is humorous at first, but the thief starts to feel a sense of pride and admiration for the emperor's position and his countrymen that he never felt before. The ending is heartbreaking and the final image of a flag floating down a river is enormously moving and a personal statement by Kurosawa on the state of his country at the time. Ran is an ambitious retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear. This time, the emperor's kingdom is divided between his sons. Two are avaricious and have Macbeth-ish wives and lieges whose influence and lust for power over the brothers ineluctably leads to everyone's downfall. This is one of the best films ever made and is routinely voted by critics as one of the best films of the 80s. Kurosawa'a visual sense is precise and beautiful to behold and the lead performance by Tatsuya Nakadai (Mifune's successor), is one of the best I've ever seen- its like a fully realized Noh performance. This film is a perfect and rare example of how a master filmmaker can crystallize his vision onto the screen with seemingly zero effort. It is truly astounding. By the way, these few films I mentioned are readily avaliable at Movie Stop and most likely Blockbuster.

In later blogs, I will discuss other foreign filmmakers including my favorite, Federico Fellini. Perhaps I will do one a week. We'll see. But I think for now, I've given enough rental/purchase ideas for the lay film enthusiast. So enjoy my selections and please give me feedback as to your thoughts and feelings on these films.