Super Troopers

Generally, if you want to kill a movie, pass it through the Basic Cable Heavy Rotation machine a few times. Just ask The Shawshank Redemption, Cast Away, or The Lord of the Rings. And while TNT may be movie hit man #1, Comedy Central also is pretty good at wearing a film down to the nub. Fortunately, perhaps because of its solid R-ratedness, Super Troopers has survived every effort to erode the value of a movie in which a traffic stop punctuated by meows counts as an iconic moment in cinema history.

Super Troopers was the second feature film of Broken Lizard, a comedy-troupe-turned-production-team that went on to produce, for better or worse, Club Dread and Beerfest. I'm not here to defend those pictures (although they are defensible, more or less) but to assure the uninitiated that Super Troopers is an amiable sorta-cop, sorta-buddy movie that feels like a really good version of pre-Animal House '70s comedies—with an amiably ironic wink at the need for plot and coherence. That's because the movie works like sketch comedy, and it works most of the time. I'm not going to lay out a string of memorable moments—I want to, but I'd rather you find them yourself—however, I have the distinct feeling that, even if the goofy cruelty of Reno 911! or the fearless foolishness of Pineapple Express isn't paying homage to Super Troopers, they should.

If you decide to watch it, and you begin to think, "This isn't funny, it's just stupid," please remember: "These boys get that syrup in 'em, they get all antsy in their pantsy."

Cropsey (2009)

I'm not sure whether Cropsey is entirely successful as a documentary—but as an evocation of some of the most striking features of post-Blair Witch Project horror, it manages to settle into one's consciousness like X-Files Black Oil. That's not to say that its basic "documentary" premise isn't compelling: Staten Island filmmakers/residents explore an urban legend from their childhood involving accounts of child disappearances and the potential link to a local home for developmentally disabled children. The disappearances occurred, the hospital was a snakepit—Geraldo Rivera earned his place in TV journalism history by exposing it back in the early 1970s—and an appropriately creepy suspect was apprehended and convicted; and the film does a good job of exploring the uneasy intersection between the anxious desire to uncover mysteries and the flights of imagination needed to try.

However, what stays with me most are the ghostly, straight-to-tape visuals (Rivera's foremost, his cameraman's bright lights smearing across the darkened frame to catch glimpses of the hospital's miserable inmates cowering under lavatory sinks, huddled in corners) and the overall mood of a dream remembered—as both dream and memory wander, circle closer, then end in uncertainty. Again, while the film explores an idea—the limits of understanding—it does so by evoking the shaky-cam grainy aesthetic of "found-footage" horror films. I'm not sure if the filmmakers deliver an entirely ethical film, but it's invaluable as a confrontation with our desire to see horror at odds with our dread of feeling terror. The former entertains, in a sudden-drop-dizzy kind of way, but the latter—ah, that's Edmund Burke territory, the most sublime feeling, the one that tosses us back a few dozen millennia and lets us peer into the cave where we're not the only ones hiding in the corner: Something's in there with us. And it's Something that we may have made, but it lives on its own now, and little movies like Cropsey swing the light bar and give us a glimpse of what it might be.

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It is with some hesitation that I provide a link to Geraldo Rivera's 1972 Eyewitness News piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbiYJkiX-Dg

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

It's been more than a decade, at least, since I've seen The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)—but, from what I do recall, it's the kind of movie best recommended from a position of uncertainty and in dim recollection. I'm fond of noting the dreamlike quality of many films—of even the act of movie-watching itself—but that may well be a flaw on my part, too willing as I am to fall in love with any bright thing that catches my eye, no matter how dimly.

But this movie is perfectly suited to the oneiric trance-state: I'm certain that even as you watch it, as it lies right there brand-new on the surface of your eyeballs, it will fall into dreams. Jodie Foster is Taxi Driver-young, but already older than you'd think—or maybe like. And Martin Sheen is in that first surprising period of his career when you're never quite sure what he might do next. The two of them are Dreamers, and this movie is suited to their nodding heads—and your own, if you're willing to peer into the fuzzy spaces this movie jams everyone into, the clammy situations—pedophilia, Oedipal glee, blank loneliness, false magic, all kinds of desperate secrecy and everyday weirdness—that the '70s perfected. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane was released a year before Eraserhead; David Lynch's picture, though, was four years in the making; he must've exhaled some strange juju across the middle of that decade to encourage all kinds of dank blossoms to bloom, including this one.

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NOTE: This title is no longer available on Instant Play; disc only. Curses!

Happy-Go-Lucky

I can't decide whether Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky is assertively optimistic or aggressively pessimistic—and I could certainly surrender and write that it's both, and not be dismissed too quickly. After all, while those who set themselves against happy-go-lucky "Poppy" (Sally Hawkins in total immersion mode) are damaged at the least and pure creeps at the worst, they do not necessarily prevail: She continues to be herself, and continues to remold the world as a good place. On the other hand, her attempts to do so often seem painfully naive. In particular, the driving instructor she must deal with because her bike had been stolen is a dangerous lunatic—and not a comic one, not a Danny McBride galoot you can't find yourself able to hate, despite his self-absorbed brutishness.  No, Poppy is saddled with a deeply disturbed man (played by the ever-tightly-wound Eddie Marsan, one of the many gems in the British character actor crown). But: She takes to him, she plugs away, she insists that she can be happy—and that he can, too.

I'll leave this inkblot of a movie up to you. If I must commit to some position, I'd offer that it may be a movie that wants you to reject Poppy's worldview—and then reveals exactly the world you're left with. Whether she's a fool or not, Poppy's paradise seems better than the hell she so doggedly attempts to ignore. Whether she can survive her handmade heaven is another matter.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

There's a little joke in Safety Not Guaranteed (or it's one I'm imagining) that anyone who's into "hip" network sitcoms and also was into animation in its 1990s-TV heyday might get: The female lead is named "Darius," and to top it off she's played by Aubrey Plaza, who in Parks and Recreation over the past few years has been honing her almost-Goth-but-mostly-bored post-millennial version of the kind of post-adolescent scorn we know so well from Ghost World—and (the point of the little joke) from Daria, the Beavis and Butt-Head MTV spinoff in the late '90s that featured an Aubrey-Plaza-like dark-haired, monotone-voiced young woman who's long been Over It. What "it," you might ask? Well, like Brando's rebel in The Wild Ones, whatever you got.*

Here, she's ready to have nothing to do with a Silly Season news story that may not be there at all, about a classified ad from someone seeking a time-travel companion who "must bring your own weapons." Let me pause and note that the past decade has seen what may be the Great Time-Travel Movie Renaissance—and not just big-budget near-hits and definite-misses like Hot Tub Time Machine and The Lake House; just scout around, and there's Time Crimes, the ineffable Donnie Darko, and the big-budget, clever-plus-morose Looper—not to mention the mysterious and dense king of the indie time-travel pics, Primer.  Even Woody Allen has fun with time-travel as regressive escape in Midnight in Paris.  Safety Not Guaranteed actually has more in common with Allen's picture than the others, in that the movie is mostly about states of mind and relationships than it is the usual (and, when done correctly, compelling) paradoxes of tinkering with time.

The tone of the movie is pure indie-quirky, with equal measures world-weary irony and exasperated risk-taking.  Again, let me stress that the fun of the usual time-travel movie is nicely subsumed here into a consideration of the personalities who would indulge in it—and of those who find themselves attracted to such indulgence. Above all, the ongoing skepticism of the reporter and accompanying interns allows the movie its punchline: Is it real? Will someone travel in time? No spoilers here, just a reassurance that things get clear enough at the end to justify Darius' growing conviction that the existence of time travel is not as important as the decision to believe in it.

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*And just to lean on the cute-hip-o-meter a little more, Plaza's co-star is Jake Johnson from The New Girl, a show that may be the epitome of postmodern screwball, and I mean that as a big fan.

TRAVELLER (1997)

Traveller is one of those movies you like to keep handy so you can pull it out as a gift. Bill Paxton wanted this one made, and he (along with Mark Wahlberg, among others) does a fine job of evoking Irish "gypsy" culture in the U.S. While over the past decade or so we've caught up with the Travellers—Brad Pitt is hilarious in Snatch as a Traveller with an accent so impenetrable that not even his fellow Britishers understand him; and I believe there's a reality show about them; but this one has all the heart and rough honesty you need.  It reminds me of Trucker—which I have written about on this blog (HERE)—in its intimacy, but the con-game plot(s) adds more than domestic issues (which it also covers).

Most online commenters note how under-appreciated Traveller is; well, now's your chance to join the appreciators. At the least, afterwards you'll think twice when someone pulls up and offers to tar your roof at a bargain price.

MAD DOG AND GLORY (1993)

Mad Dog and Glory is one that I've returned to more than a few times.  It's a movie where everything—and everyone—comes together so well that each new viewing just makes me appreciate it more.  John McNaughton—and how I wish he could have the career he deserves—finds just the right rhythm to sustain Richard (The Color of Money/Clockers/The Wire) Price's funny, hard-boiled screenplay.  And man, the performances: Uma Thurman does more with her proud, scared Glory than Tarantino ever allowed in the endless hours and hours of Kill Bills; Bill Murray lets everybody know just how charismatic he can be, his Frank Milo a sad and lonely bar of lead to the back of the head; Richard Caruso makes me yearn for that early-'90s moment when he was allowed to escape TV; and dependable Mike Starr gives one of his greatest quirky-mug performances—he still makes me laugh when, after slugging it out with Caruso, he notes in passing to his boss, "That guy bites."

But this time around, I watched De Niro and saw one of his most nuanced performances, as good as his quiet work in A Bronx Tale (released in the same year!).  As Mad Dog, though, he gives himself more than a quiet man but, with the help of Price's remarkable script, a complicated one, part artist, part almost-loser, someone who wants to be somewhere else, as he puts it—and most of all a man waiting to grow up, and in the process getting more than a little help from Uma.

Again, I guess I've seen this one a half-dozen times or so over the years, in bits and pieces on TV; but this time around I seemed to re-discover it, and reminded myself how deeply satisfying an entertainment a well-made movie can be.