Item #7 - Get Some Movie Culture

Jar Jar Binks . . . made me a movie snob. 

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I heart movies.  I worked at a movie theater back in high school, back when AMC employees got to wear cool bow ties and vests as their uniforms, and when then employees had to risk life and limb by buttering the customer's popcorn (when the butter vat was empty, you knew it. Mostly because you had the burn marks along your arm to show it after it sprayed the last bits of delicious fatty-American buttery goodness all over them). Kids today . . . so spoiled.

Anyway, there were 2 great perks from the job. One - they sometimes showed the new blockbusters to the working crew on Thursdays at midnight, before the rest of you common folk got to the following day. And two - unlimited free movies.  And when you're in high school, and you live in a middle class suburbia, and you don't really drink yet because you're lame, there's not a whole lot to do except go to the movies and see lots and lots of crap. But naturally when you're a stupid kid, if it gets you out of the house on a Friday night, it's cinematic gold.

I'm one of those people that's keeps ticket stubs from everything I've ever been to. I suppose most people do it so they can look back and see how cool they were because they saw Band X before they were big. But in this case, I just took a look back at some movie stubs from high school to see how bad my movie (or really, the group's movie taste) had been. Some glaring examples of movies that I may have actually paid money in a theater to see - Anacanda, Double Team ("starring" Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman), and Bio-Dome (though for some sick reason I still enjoy this movie).  That is a quality trifecta of poor taste.

Then in 1999, George Lucas, a man I had previously admired and about whom I wrote a biography in English class, finally decided to make the 3 prequel Star Wars movies. And being somewhat of a Star Wars geek at the time, I was fairly psyched. So a friend got tickets early and as the nerds that we were, we went to see the Phantom Menace the day it came out (though no, were weren't nerdy enough to be one of the people you'd see in this classic Triumph video).  And for the first time in my life, when the movie ended, I walked out the theater and said . . . "what the FUCK was THAT?" It was disappointing in ways that I could have never even imagined.

For the first time, I realized that special effects could only take a movie so far. For the first time, I realized character development actually meant something. For the first time, I realized casting could actually destroy what little character development there was. It was . . . it was brutal. And the cornerstone for my and every other rational person's disdain was the completely unnecessary (and arguably racist) character of Jar Jar Binks. So thanks to him, and thanks to George Lucas, I've slowly but surely become more a movie snob since then.

Granted there's varying levels of snobdom, and I'm sure there's plenty of artsy types around elitist Boston that would scoff at my DVD collection, but Phantom Menace pushed my own movie snootiness above the typical American movie goers view of what a "good movie" is. I slowly gravitated towards what the critics recommended as opposed to what the box office numbers recommended (I joked about Kangaroo Jack in the chart above, but that was in all seriousness a #1 movie at the US box office when it opened. People in this country are sick I tell you). And I even slowly began to recognize and appreciate certain movie styles (like all semi-hispters, I love me some Wes Anderson movies).

So as I continue my journey up the movie snobdom chain, it was only fitting that I try and explore the cinematic world in a new way. And since I've seen more than enough garbage over the years (whether I recognized at the time or not), it was time to take in some old school Oscar winning films. And last week I had a triple header, watching 3 movies that won Best Picture on back-to-back-to-back nights - The French Connection (from 1971), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and On the Waterefront (1954).

At this point, I should probably be breaking down these films for you for all their great complexities, and acting brilliance and yada yada yada. Alas, while I've become fairly snooty in my movie selection, and in what I actually enjoy, as a critic I probably have no idea what I'm the hell talking about and if I actually tried to dissect these Oscar winners, I'd only embarrass myself. So I'll take the cheap way out and do some bullet points instead:

• Its always cool to see actors way before they did the roles you know them for. Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider (that dude from Jaws) in The French Connection. Alec Guinness (aka, Obi-Wan Kenobi) in The Bridge on the River Kwai). And Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (yes, I'm sure tons of people relate him to this role first as opposed to The Godfather, but I'm 31 years old. I don't). 
• Man was there some old school racism in the 70's. The usual terms were thrown around in The French Connection, but I was especially amused by "you dumb guinea" and by the cops calling the French characters "frogs."And he didn't even look around for other Fenchies before saying "frogs" out loud.
• Also amusing in that movie - a game of street hockey played on roller skates, Panam airlines, and a character casually strolling up to the ticket counter at the airport and buying a round trip ticket from NYC to DC for $54, done so without showing any ID (though the clerk did tell the passenger to print his name on both tickets or he wouldn't be allowed on - that's some good old timey security).
• Going into the 3, I figured I would probably enjoy them in the reverse order of when they were made.  Newer = better, right? And even their topics suggested so - The French Connection being about cops going after drug smugglers, River Kwai being about a WWII POW camp, and On the Waterfront dealing with corrupt unions (and it was also the only one with a love story). But while I enjoyed all 3, I actually enjoyed them in the actual order they were made, thinking On the Waterfront was the best of the 3. Preconceived notions . . . . for suckers. 

And as a closing remark, not that I really need to say it . . . go see these movies. They're Best Pictures. They're, ya know, legitimately damn good films.