THE MASTER LIST

Here is list of all the movies we watched, by decade!
The 1950's!
All About Eve, Kiss Me Deadly, Touch of Evil, Julius Caesar, High School Confidential!, Lost Lonely and Vicious

The 1960's!
Easy Rider, Cleopatra, The Cut-Ups, Towers Open Fire, William Buys a Parrot, Dynamite Chicken, Take the Money and Run, Bonnie and Clyde

The 1970's!
M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, THX 1138, Jaws, 1941, Apocalypse Now

The 1980's
Blue Velvet, Blade Runner, Do The Right Thing, Repo Man, Tootsie

We also watched a film called Drive, He Said, which Mr. Turner would not stop recommending to us. He even gave us his personal VHS recorded in like the late 80's off Cinemax. Spoiler Alert!: The movie was weird.

Thanks for reading!

Tootsie

Tootsie is the adorable story of an out of work actor's, Dustin Hoffman, attempts to find work in New York City. When he can't make it as a male actor, he dresses up like a woman and gets a job on a General-Hospital-like soap.

Emily: I had seen this before and we wanted to watch something cute because Do the Right Thing was sad, Repo Man was weird, and the cocktail of disturbing that was the combination of Blue Velvet, Apocalypse Now, and Blade Runner all in a row was a little much for the two of us.

Kamala: Tootsie is an adorable light-as-air comedy about a man trying to make it as a female actor in NYC. It isn't one of those movies that you praise artistically afterwards, but it was fine, I mean it was cute. We hadn't watched enough of those typical big studio movies in the 80's and so we decided to watch this one. It was produced by the now-late Sydney Pollack. He cast Bill Murray as Hoffman's roommate. IMDB says that all of his lines were improvised but I don't think that is such a feat because he basically said the same thing with the same annoying deadpan face every time. Like "this is getting creepy Michael" or "do you want help with that brassiere?"

Emily: Oh snap

anyways Tootsie was also jolly redhead giant Geena Davis's film debut. Dustin Hoffman and Sydney Pollack worked closely together to make this film. The idea came to Hoffman to play both a man and a woman while working on Kramer vs. Kramer, which is a good movie just so everyone knows. We don't really have much to say about this one, it was one of those PG sightly racy family comedies and Dustin Hoffman is an unbelievable jerk to this woman he is working on a play with as "Michael." I mean Kamala and I had to pause the movie to make sure that he really had just I mean he was horrible. Tootsie is adorable, as we have said, and if you are looking for something light and happy to watch in between films about a robot apocalypse, apocalypse now, and a small town gangster/pervert, Tootsie is the film for you!

"No one ever laughed during the shooting of any scenes of the film. It's only funny because of its story structure." -Sydney Pollack

Repo Man

Kamala: Repo Man is this weird independent cult film from 1984. It is about this 18 year old punk from LA who becomes a repo man when Bud, a veteran repo man played by Harry Dean Stanton, tricks him into repossessing someone's car and taking it to their lot.

Emily: This movie made no sense to me. I had to keep pausing it so Kamala could explain things. Emilio Estevez is the young disillusioned punk kid who becomes a repo man, there were a lot of car chases and people getting fried by the radiation (the neutron bomb, which vaporizes people but not buildings) from the trunk of the Chevy Malibu. Speaking of that-the glowing trunk of the car is probably an homage to the glowing suitcase that set people on fire from Kiss Me, Deadly. Repo Man brought its director, Alex Cox critical acclaim and it's cited as one of the first contemporary independent movies. The fact that it wasn't a very "deep" movie (a fact that Kamala had to keep reminding me of) did not at all take away from its enjoyability.

Kamala: This movie has become a cult classic because it's full of aliens and stuff about time travel, and also humorously portrays the LA punk scene of the 1980's. The conceit of labeling all the food and drink as exactly what it was (Cereal simply marked "Cereal," beer labeled "beer," etc) is neat. There are a lot of interconnecting motifs in this movie. One example of this is one man in the Repo yard talks about how if one person is thinking about a plate of shrimp, another person will say "plate" or "shrimp" or "plate of shrimp." And these words appear a lot throughout the film.

Emily: Practically every character in this movie appears more than once, even very minor characters like Otto's friend Kevin. This movie is just choc-full of weird stuff that only really attentive people or people who have seen it more than once can really pick up on-something I noticed though, is that whenever we see a car making a turn, it signals the opposite direction.

Kamala: The soundtrack is made up of really awesome punk songs and the score is fairly reminiscent of Tarantino and I really want it so I can listen to it in my car.

Emily: I think the movie had a lot to do with the punk movement. Alex Cox directed Sid & Nancy (a movie about Sex Pistol's bassist Sid Vicious and his relationship with Nancy Spungen). The Circle Jerks, a rather famous California-based punk band, appear in a lounge scene. Also Black Flag has several songs on the soundtrack.

Kamala: Like Paul Schrader (who worked as a taxi driver and based his screenplay off of the experience) Alex Cox worked as a repo man in LA and based the screenplay off of some of his experiences. This movie is definitely worth watching if you're into odd sci-fi cult movies.

Emily: Pretty crazy.

Do The Right Thing

Kamala: I'm glad that Emily liked this one. Although it was no surprise to me as the Symington family has close ties to the black community. In fact, her brother won the DC African-American history bee two years in a row.

Emily: Ha. Actually though this movie is great. It is culturally significant, dealing with race conflicts in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Its centers on Mookie, played by Spike Lee, a young father working as a pizza delivery boy for an Italian-American owned neighborhood pizzeria. The majority of the film, like an hour and 45 of two hours, takes place entirely on one extremely hot summer day.

Kamala: It was really well shot. There were a lot of really interesting angles, especially one shot of Mookie walking over a little girl's chalk drawing in the street. The colors also were intensified in a way that made you really feel how how it was supposed to be. I also liked the motif of having Public Enemy's song Fight the Power playing from a boombox. It gave a realistic sense of being in this two or three block neighborhood with the same people walking in and out of your awareness. I don't know how to say that without sounding a little silly...

Emily: This film was extremely controversial when it was released. In the news it was impugned as a vehicle to incite poor black neighborhoods to riot. It also received a LOT of critical acclaim, being nominated for two academy awards and the palme d'or at Cannes to name a few. This film fits perfectly into our project because Spike Lee is a great example of one of those independent directors that emerged in the late eighties.

Kamala: The early eighties were overrun with big studio abominations and the lack of good movies out there plus increasingly available VHS home movies made it easy for anyone, not just film students, to become familiar with older films. Many of these directors were able to produce extremely new and interesting films such as Do the Right Thing, Repo Man, or, moving into the early nineties, Reservoir Dogs. Also, it was becoming easier and cheaper for people to have access to recording and editing equipment, allowing for lots of low-budget movies to be made and released by new filmmakers.

Emily: Do the Right Thing is a fresh, extremely moving film that stays with you.

Blade Runner

Kamala: Ridley Scott is either the most anal director ever, or the most dissatisfied with his studio's desired cut of his favorite film. There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the SEVEN versions of Blade Runner out there. There is an "international cut," a "theatrical cut," a "director's cut," a "final cut," and more. We watched the american theatrical cut, reworked by the studio to be easier to understand and complete with a tacked on happy ending.

Emily: Kamala said she had seen this one before, but she had seen the grittier, pessimistic director's cut from 1992, with an entirely different ending. Similarly to Brazil, one of both of our favorite films, which everyone should see, Blade Runner was repeatedly bowdlerized by studio execs who failed to see the brilliance of the director's own devastating ending.

Emily: Blade Runner is the story of Rick Deckard's forced return from his self-imposed retirement from being a blade runner. In the near future (2019...I will be 29) a technology company has released an android, the Nexus 6, that is so close to being human that, when the replicants, as they are called, start to rebel against their human masters only certain, specially trained policemen can tell the difference between them and real people. These men are called blade runners. Deckard is forced back into his career to catch 4 replicants who are particularly dangerous. Their names are Batty, Pris, Leon, and Zhora.

Kamala: What I like the most about Blade Runner is the conflict between what is human and what isn't. Is Deckard any more human than Batty just because he was born, and not created? Isn't Rachel human because she believes herself to be? Is Deckard a replicant? Rachel's character shows that basically anyone can be a replicant, so what is the barrier of the knowledge available to a human about itself? This film is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Also, the futuristic view of Los Angeles is horrifying and yet realistic. An urban nightmare where most of the healthy people with at least some means are living in off-planet colonies, and those remaining on earth speak a strange street language cobbled together from Spanish, German, Japanese, and French.

Emily: The world is a human tapestry of weirdoes. Hare Krishnas, Punks, Japanese thugs, etc.

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet was one of the independent movies released in the 1980's by a very interesting, very deranged director, David Lynch. It is the story of a small town college graduate named Jeffrey Beaumont who, after finding a severed human ear in a field, mixes himself up with a lounge singer who is being victimized by a local thug/drug lord/sex pervert. Most of the movie isn't exactly school appropriate so we aren't sure how to talk about this one.

Kamala: But first, background. David Lynch directed Eraserhead in the late 70's. It caught the attention of Mel Brooks, and he was given money to make The Elephant Man. The film was a critical success, and Lynch was contracted by Dino De Laurentiis to film a version of Frank Herbert's Dune. Lynch agreed to do it on the condition that he would be allowed to film another movie however he wanted to. That movie was Blue Velvet. He has later described it as his most personal movie, dealing with his childhood in the small town of Spokane, Washington. This movie was set in Lumberton, North Carolina which is funny because I've been to Lumberton.

Emily: I like David Lynch movies generally, especially Mulholland Drive. This one was a little slow at first, but much much easier to understand. He did not eschew narrative continuity. Blue Velvet is credited with revitalizing Dennis Hopper's career, and he is rivetingly great as the sociopathic murderer. Also Kyle MacLachlan has a role in Desperate Housewives.

Kamala: That's too bad. From David Lynch movies to Desperate Housewives. Also he looks exactly, EXACTLY like a young Jon Zeljo, which is pretty scary considering like some of the stuff that he does in the film. Yet also strangely fitting....

Emily: Except for not, because Desperate Housewives is awesome....

Kamala: I generally like movies that have a lot of awesome bright colors and light. The opening sequence was a shot of brightly red roses in front of a white picket fence, in front of a strikingly blue sky. It looked like one of those Salvador Dali paintings of roses in the sky, beautiful.

Emily: I liked that shot too. The use of Roy Orbison's song "In Dreams" was great, as well as the titular pop song "Blue Velvet."

Kamala: I have "seen" one other David Lynch movie, his newest called Inland Empire, and let me tell you, Blue Velvet was far more enjoyable. For one, I saw most of the Inland Empire's three hours through my fingers because it was absolutely terrifying. Moreso, it was virtually plotless, centering on Laura Dern, one of Lynch's favorites who plays a teenager smitten with Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, but occasionally drifting in and out of Rabbits, Poland (?), and reality. Blue Velvet on the other hand was intensely watchable. The villain was despicable, disturbed, and well acted, the femme fatale/victim was suitably messed up in the head, and the main character was one of the most morally conflicted I had ever seen. He alternated between sweet, naive, creepy, driven, and pseudo-rapist personalities.

Emily: This movie was amazing and I recommend it highly.

The 1980's

The legacy of the 1970's left on American film was the public's acceptance of more graphically realistic depictions of sex and violence. Enter directors like Ed Wood, John Waters, and David Lynch. We think it would be incomprehensible for someone like Lynch to make a movie that could win an Academy Award in the 1960's or even the early 1970's. The Elephant Man is like, well, an elephant while Easy Rider, which was controversial for its time, is like something a lot smaller than an elephant. The 1980's also saw a flourishing of actual independent films, rather than "independent" studios like American Zoetrope that worked inside the system financing directors with interesting visions. The formation of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute helped to finance many independent directors like Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant, Stephen Soderbergh, and more especially in the early 1990's. Which we won't get to. But who cares. Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and others released independent films towards the end of the 1980's and into the early 1990's. They were called the video generation because, due to the increasing availability of VHS home videos, they were able to amass huge libraries of movies from all over the world that would influence their work. This can be seen in the large number of references to other films, such as Kiss Me Deadly for example, in Tarantino's work.

The studios lost money in the 1980's too perhaps because of all the crappy blockbusters that Kamala hates that they made or perhaps because of all the cool independent movies coming out that were pretty available for viewing.

Apocalypse Now

Kamala: Uh

Emily: This is one of my all-time favorite movies. Kamala had never seen it before though, and she's still in shock. She generally avoids movies about the Vietnam war. In case you are a loser and you've never seen Apocalypse Now, it's a film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, loosely based on the Joseph Conrad novel, Heart of Darkness. It stars Martin Sheen as a Captain sent on a mission to terminate the command of one Colonel Kurtz, who has gone insane and retreated into the jungle of Cambodia with a small army of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and Green Berets who worship him as a god.

Kamala: The entire film was visually striking. I can only imagine what their budget was like. Between the napalm attacks, helicopters, other random stuff that got blown up, and large amount of extras the entire production was of epic proportions. We read on IMDB trivia that the movie was shot over 16 months, mostly in 1976, but not released until 1979 because of the amount of time it took to sort through and edit the over 200 hours of footage that Coppola shot. The editing team's efforts show in the flawless cinematography. There are some films where you are taken out of the story by some weird cut or something that makes you remember you are watching a movie. The only thing that made me remember I was watching a movie was that my Grandma called in the middle.

Emily: Something I hadn't noticed before is that there are no starting credits-no title appears onscreen at the beginning, it just goes straight in with the footage of Martin Sheen's face and jungle burning to The Doors' "The End." At Kurtz's compound, however, the words "Our motto: Apocalypse Now" are seen on a wall. This was put there so the movie could be copyrighted.

Kamala: In terms of cultural importance, this is one of the films (similar to 1941) that made studios want to take some control away from the dirrectors. Coppola took some men into the jungle, subjected them to shooting an emotionally and physically devastating film and came out of the jungle 16 months later with no footage they could use for three years. The actors were genuinely feeling the emotions of their characters. Lawrence Fishburne was actually younger than he should have been during filming, just as he was on the navy boat in the backwoods of Vietnam. Martin Sheen has a scene at the beginning of the movie where he gets drunk, punches a mirror and trashes his room naked was, in actuality, REAL. And there was a real cow sacrificed.

Emily: The dialogue is also something that stays with you long after the movie ends. The voice of Marlon Brando at the beginning of the film ("I saw a snail crawl across the edge of a straight razor. This is my dream. This is my nightmare") haunts the viewer as much as it haunts Sheen's character. Pretty much any scene with Robert Duvall as Captain Killgore is funny in a terrible way- the contrast of the conversation (about surfing, mostly) and the surroundings is absurd. But the movie gets progressively more horrific the farther they get into the jungle. This movie is incredible, and is undeniably the best war movie ever filmed. Nothing even comes close. At the end Kamala and I were silent for about five minutes because honestly what can you say after you've just watched something like that?

Kamala: Oh the horror, the horror.

or schadenfreude, whichever you prefer.

1941

1941 is a Stephen Spielberg action farce about a Japanese attack on Hollywood.

Emily: Sounds great right? Ha ha wrong it sucked. The entire film was like one of those interconnected lives movies where, at the end, all the stories come together, but instead of it being a good example of a film like that (such as Magnolia) it was crappy. The whole premise was that a Japanese submarine, left out of the glory of the attack on Pearl Harbor, sailed (is that the right word for a submarine?) to Los Angeles to try and annihilate Hollywood. The Japanese, led by Akira Kurosawa's favorite Toshiro Mifune, bumble along

Kamala: In a fitting tribute to Jaws, the opening scene was the same actress who played Jaws' first victim skinnydipping at night and ending up stuck on the top of the surfacing submarine's periscope. I say fitting because Jaws' success in box offices across America led to the drive to create movies like this. Interestingly enough, this was one of the movies that helped to make studios realize that maybe they shouldn't give their directors all the freedom in the world. The film was intended as a blockbuster, but really did rather poorly at the box office.

Emily: It was one of those "action-packed" appetite for destruction movies where the last 30-40 minutes consist of the plain and simple destruction of everything possible on the set. Movie theatres, airplanes, gas stations, cars, tanks, ferris wheels, there is even a shot of an entire house falling off a cliff. I am not a person who hates action films, but this was excessive and pointless.

Kamala: I thought it might be funny because Dan Aykroyd was in it and I generally think he is a pretty cool guy, but there was little humor that wasn't that kind of unfunny crude stuff.

1941 is a perfect example of the difference between the interesting films of New Hollywood that pushed the envelope in at least some way, and the schlock produced by studios during the blockbuster boom of the late 1970's.

JAWS!!!!!!!!!

Jaws is the awesome tale of an epic battle between men and a primordial beast. When an absolutely gigantic Great White shark starts preying on the beaches of Amity Island, a summer beach community that seems based on, and was filmed at, Martha's Vineyard. The greasy mayor of the town won't let the wet behind the ears sheriff close the beaches, his greatest source of income, to cut off the shark's food supply. After a few local fishermen's misguided attempts to catch the monster, three men, the sheriff, a salty fisherman, and a shark enthusiast from the "oceanographic institute," set out in what is perhaps too small of a boat to search and destroy Jaws.

This movie is epic. The first scene is epic, the middle bits are pretty epic, and the end is certainly epic. It also isn't a crappy movie. In fact, this movie is considered to be the dividing line between New Hollywood, and the blockbusters that dominated the late seventies and really, continue to dominate movie theaters today.

What is a blockbuster you ask? Technically, a blockbuster is a film that makes over $100,000,000. Jaws was the first movie in history to make over 100 million. But, I want to use the term to mean a film that was created with the intent of making huge amounts of money in the box office. These movies, in my elitist opinion, can easily turn into high budget monstrosities designed for mass appeal. Let's look at the top films in the box offices right now. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the latest installment in a franchise started by Lucasfilm and Spielberg in the eighties, has fallen behind the Sex and the City movie, which I don't want to profane because I will probably see that tonight but is an obviously artless ploy for box office success. Ironman, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Speed Racer, Made of Honor, it is summer so pretty much all of the movies out now are "blockbusters" in the sense that they don't seek to advance the art form, only to gross as much money as possible. Jaws was followed by The Omen and Star Wars, two movies that, especially Star Wars, made just oh so much money.

Jaws was a great, smart movie with a gripping plot and awesome action. It made so much money in the box office that studios started to want to make more and more and more movies with similar templates: relatable characters, lots of action, and at least one naked woman, like the thousand sequels Universal tried to make, including Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, Jaws: The Revenge, and Jaws Unleashed (which is a video game but whatever).

All that said, I love Jaws, and anyone who hasn't seen it should watch it unless you are Emily, who refused to watch this with me, and have an actual, diagnosable phobia of sharks.
-Kamala

THX 1138

This movie was George Lucas' first. He adapted it into a full length feature from a short film he made in film school. THX 1138 is the story of the titular character's life in a strict futuristic dystopian society. Sex is outlawed, and mind-controlling drugs are administered forcibly. THX, Robert Duvall's character, and his "roommate" LUH fall in LUHve...

Emily: I'd like to let the readers know that Kamala made that joke just now, not I.

Kamala: Anyways, lets strip away the pretensions here, I'm the one who writes the intros so from now on I'll just attribute it to me. THX, Robert Duvall's character, and his "roommate" LUH fall in love and are jailed for drug evasion (they stop taking their required sedatives) and sexual perversion (because they start actually having sex).

Emily: The role of the movie's other main character, SEN, confused me. He is turned in by THX because he hacked into the computer system to try and switch roommates. He wants THX to be his roommate and it's never really made clear why. In the 2004 re-mastered DVD release of this film, George Lucas made the ties of the three characters (LUH, THX and SEN) more obvious by having LUH and SEN work in the same place monitoring camera footage of houses, and adding footage of SEN and LUH exchanging a meaningful glance when they catch a couple engaging in illicit sexual activity. He escapes from prison with Robert Duvall but they get separated and SEN completely loses it and goes to pray to the state-sponsored deity OMM. I did not get him...

Kamala: The religious aspect was quite interesting. There were numerous scenes where THX would go to one of these confessional booths that had a portrait of Jesus and a recorded voice that spouted platitudes such as "yess...goood....everything will be fine...you are a true believer" etc. I also want to talk about the overall look of the film. I thought it was awesome. The set was white and geometric, with little color. All the regular people wore white and were bald. Their entire society was based on dehumanizing its constituents, through drugs, suppression of sexual instinct, lack of names, and homogeneity. George Lucas did an excellent job of creating this dystopian world. The only strange thing was that about halfway through we noticed some of the special effects were very very very good for 1971. Turns out that the version we watched was the Directors Cut, and Lucas had re-mastered a lot of the special effects.

Emily: Kamala really dislikes the ending. The police stop chasing THX because they've gone too far over the "budget" for re-capturing a felon. Robert Duvall emerges from the shell surrounding the city into a setting sun, with choral music playing over the scene. She said it was corny and cliche. It didn't bother me as much, but it did seem somewhat anti-climactic since the whole rest of the movie was so great.

Kamala: It was cool to see the development of Star Wars in Lucas's earliest film. Some of the very geometric shots of people walking through white hallways looked just like the hallways in Lando's Cloud City.

Emily: Also they called something a Wookiee. I didn't catch exactly what it was referring to but the word was definitely used.

Kamala: Basically this was an awesome sci-fi movie, a beautiful film, and gave you a little something to think about afterwards. I am a huge fan of dystopias of any genre, and THX 1138 reminded me a lot, of course, of some of my favorite dystopias: We, Brave New World/Island, 1984, and Brazil, a film that EVERYONE should see. I would highly recommend THX 1138 to anyone.