"Walt sent me."
This could be the most important film from my childhood. Certainly a favorite and one that I may have watched more than any other, but this did so much more than just keep me entertained. Who Framed Roger Rabbit taught me how to love movies.
It instilled a reverence for the history of film and a fascination with the business of moviemaking (warts and all). Tropes I encountered in the years to come landed like dreams remembered because…
David Lynch often had to remind us that the film is the thing, or the talking. If you can find the language to convey your ideas in another medium, maybe you wouldn't make a film about it.
Gregg Araki used that "beautiful language called cinema," as Lynch put it, to say things that might otherwise seem unspeakable, to give dignity and vitality to characters who are not just broken, who contain depths beyond even their deepest shames. Talking about it…
"Do you know Animal Collective?"
That line found my aging hipster heat signature like a Stinger missile.
A delight that might move you but won't break you. Incredible melodramatic restraint with what I was sure had to be a Chekhov's Cigarette in the opening scene. The lighting in the record store during the finale 🤌
Thanks, Robert, for the roulette rec!
When those bones were cracklin', I was a-cacklin'!
Derek is a more soulful protagonist than I would have expected from one of these 50s programmers. I was moved when his disembodied head appeared to send us off. I genuinely believe it takes some talent to deliver lines in the specifically wooden way required of aliens in atomic-age sci-fi movies.
"You may find this hard to believe but I've never slept in a round bed."
Incredible pickup line from a 53-year-old Walter Matthau. Only in the 1970s could this have worked.
A grim heist movie for a grim era, leavened with Matthau's unique cunning and charm. Joe Don Baker's Molly feels like a template for Anton Chigurh.
And if I just keep watching all the movies I will eventually hear every line from every Tarantino film—this time it was "go to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch."
