15 Directors Who Shaped My Movie Love

So there's this meme going around that Paolo tagged me with. So why not? The idea is that you list 15 directors, mainly off of the top of your head, that contributed to the way you experience and think about the movies. This is not a list of my all time favorites though half of the list would probably overlap. This is the list I come up with when I think briefly on the formative masterminds and/or the ones that have or had some sort of claim on my soul if you will. Three of them I could definitely live without at this point but I'm trying to be honest about the exercize.

Wise with Wood ~ West Side Story 

So here goes in no particular order... 


ROBERT WISE (1914-2005)
When I was a kid West Side Story and The Sound of Music were the most Epically ! Epic !!! movies to me. At the time I didn't quite grasp the auteur theory but at some point I became aware that this guy had made both so therefore "He must be the best director of all time!" Later I discovered that he wasn't but I still think he's a stronger talent than he gets credit for being nowadays.
first encounters: The Sound of Music and West Side Story (on television) 

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980)
As I said in my Rope retro, he's training wheels for any young budding film buff who is curious about The Man Behind the Curtain (Hitch or otherwise).
first encounter: North By Northwest (I think I saw it here, the place I saw many old movies for the first time. My parents didn't know what a monster they were creating by taking me there regularly.)

WOODY ALLEN (1935-)
For the same reason as Hitchcock really; it's impossible to think you're watching anyone else's film. Woody was the first director I "followed", eagerly anticipating and attending each movie as soon as I could. As a result, he'll always have a place in my heart.
first encounters: Broadway Danny Rose (in theaters... my older brother's idea), The Purple Rose of Cairo (in theaters, my idea)

Wyler meeting Charlton Heston's son.

WILLIAM WYLER (1902-1981)
The auteur theory isn't everything. This man understood dramatic storytelling and didn't dumb it down but made accessible all the nuances and fine points. Plus he could wring top notch work from all kinds of actors. His resume is deservedly overstuffed-with-classics. Just last month while watching The Best Years of Our Lives I even dreamed of watching all of his movies chronologically in a row for a blog project. I bet it would be an awesome journey. 
first encounters: Ben Hur (revival house) and Wuthering Heights (VHS) 

STEVEN SPIELBERG (1946-)
Because everyone loves him and therefore he was ubiquitous when I was growing up and still is to a degree. There was no question that he was shaping Hollywood and more than one moviegoing generation. I never felt personally attached but he was always present in the movie menu.
first encounters: Raiders of the Lost Arc & E.T. (in theaters)... the latter is the only movie I can ever remember seeing with my Grandma *sniffle*






JAMES CAMERON (1954-)
Because I seriously wish he was mandatory study/viewing for anyone assigned to direct a mainstream action film. He's never created an action sequence that was boring or difficult to follow (few others can say the same) and even if the dialogue is and was a bit clunky, his films are such masterful pop(corn). Plus, like all the greatest directors, he doesn't ignore female characters but makes them crucial players.


first encounters: The Terminator (cable), Aliens (in theaters... one of the very first R rated movies I ever saw in theaters. Ooohh.)

Pedro and His Muses celebrate All About My Mother's Oscar win

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR (1949-)
Truth: I look forward to no one else's movies more. Pedro always gives audiences something for the heart, the brain, the eyes and the groin and rare is the filmmaker who understands to provide us with all four pleasures in each and every film. 


first encounters: Women on the Verge... (in theaters), Law of Desire (VHS) 

Ridley with Veronica Cartwright on 
the Nostromo in Alien (1979)

RIDLEY SCOTT (1937-)
Because he made two movies that I remain deeply in the thrall of (Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise) and kicked off one franchise I obsessed over regularly for a good long while (Alien). And he helped inform my love of Art Direction within movies. All that but I could never work up much enthusiasm for anything in between or after those three peaks which just goes to show you: even if you love someone's something, you never know how it's all gonna shake out in terms of fandom.

first encounters: Legend (in theaters), Blade Runner (I can't remember how I first saw this...? There's too many versions!)

TIM BURTON (1958-)
He started off so very strong and stylized. Few things are as pleasureable as the weird and whimsical as long as they're genuinely felt and not manufactured. Unfortunately...  no, no, let's not go there! I can't deal.

first encounters: Pee Wees Big Adventure (I think on cable?), Beetlejuice (in theaters)

Sirk with Dorothy Malone on the set of Written on the Wind (1956) 
Why is she reading My Antonia?

DOUGLAS SIRK (1900-1987)
Because he influenced so many directors I love but I came to him after his ancestors which is like a glorious reminder that there's always more to experience from the past. When you sift through cinematic history you might even love someone so much that you wish you could jump in a time machine and shake the person's hand or give them a million kisses or a bear hug or promise them your first born child, depending on how they react to you arriving in the time machine in the first place. Maybe you should just send a thank you note in the machine.



first encounters: Lured and All That Heaven Allows (on DVD)

DAVID LYNCH (1946-)
Because he's a true original and yet his highly personal films resonate with so many people. It's like he was practicing Inception long before Nolan ever thought it up; his dreams and nightmares became ours. Plus, he made me believe in television as a powerful artistic medium in its own right and for its own reasons and not just the cinema's poor uglier relation. 


first encounters: Dune (in theaters) and Twin Peaks (television)

Campion's Bright Stars

JANE CAMPION (1954-)
Because there were so few female directors when she rose up but it was no kind of affirmative action enthusiasm -- she could have been a genderless space alien and would have still completely vaulted to the top of Directors Whose Movies You Must Watch!


first encounters: The Piano (in theaters), Peel (on VHS)

INGMAR BERGMAN (1918-2007)
It's not only that he made deeply great movies. I am fascinated that he ever existed at all... or rather, he has come to represent a myth / reality that I did not experience firsthand but am always fascinated to think on: the 1960s and 1970s and how adventurous movie fans once were. (See also: Federico Fellini.)


first encounters: Cries and Whispers and Persona (VHS)

ROBERT ALTMAN (1925-2006)
Movies should be crowded with true character... and characters. And they should be alive with possibilities as if the camera could follow anyone offstage and there would be a whole new movie waiting, tantalizingly out of reach.


first encounters: Fool For Love (VHS), The Player (in theaters) 

Bale & Haynes hit a Goldmine!

TODD HAYNES (1961-)
Because he keeps growing and therefore keeps us guessing. And because his one of his pet themes, the fluidity of identity, is among the most cinematic of themes.

first encounters: [Safe] (VHS), Velvet Goldmine (in theaters) 

If you ask me who are the "best" or my "favorite" directors the list would have to change at least by a third, maybe even a half. But that would require more careful consideration. If you ask me who from the past I'd like to resurrect to make one last motion picture the list would look crazy different. But that might be a fun list to make some time. Hmmmm.

I don't know who to tag since this meme has been going around for some time now. So I say YOU in the comment section: which 15 directors shaped your ideas about the movies in your formative film years.

Streep at 60: A Prairie Home Companion

The following article was originally published in January 2007. It's slightly revised below.

It didn't take Meryl Streep long. By 1987 at the very latest, just ten years into her career, we knew that she could do everything. We'd already heard the accents, seen the funny, witnessed the sexy, fallen in love, had our hearts broken and heard the magnificent singing voice. If she were less endearing and emotionally attentive as a performer her technical range would be just hateful, a thing to curse as she popped up again and again in films. But this woman has it all. She is, put simply, the most consistent versatile actor in the movies.

So what is there left for Meryl Streep to do? It turns out quite a lot.

The joy of watching her now, thirty plus years into a great filmography, is seeing which actors' muscles get flexed for each new project and seeing which past performances are its predecessors. There's also a communal thrill in watching her surprise both herself and us in each performance since there's nothing left to prove. Can you name another movie star who so regularly seems to be having a grand ole time while they're acting? Can you name another actor who is so technically accomplished but still regularly manages moments that feel spontaneous onscreen? I can't.

I've seen nearly all of her filmography which could explain why I prefer her comedic work. There's less of it so you have to hold it closer. Plus the thing I love most dearly about Meryl Streep (her joy in acting) bubbles right to the surface when she's asked to joke about. The Streep performance I cherish most on a personal level is her work in 1990's Postcards From The Edge wherein she also joked, sang, and played an entertainer. And all of this, if you'll excuse the breathless intro, is a very long way of saying that I was thrilled to see her comedic and musical chops get a work out again as "Yolanda Johnson" in A Prairie Home Companion .



Yolanda (Streep) is part of a singing group "The Johnson Girls" that once had more members but now includes just herself and her sister Rhonda (Lily Tomlin). For the first half hour of the film we get to know Yolanda in a series of brief sequences backstage. In the first she enters the theater where A Prairie Home Companion will hold its last broadcast (please note: this is a fictional film about the still running radio program) with her sister and daughter (Lindsay Lohan). She is holding too many things and nattering incessantly mostly to herself but ocassionally to others. Streep gives her character a quick easy laugh and a fluid temperament. As this sister act prepares for the show, Streep fills you in on the rest of Yolanda.

Yolanda's body language is a little fussy but also slow and open. She's often got her arms outstretched. She has a welcoming folksy presence but you get the immediate sense of fatigue from both age and a life on the road. There's also a weird dichotomous specificity of feeling that Yolanda is both a nervous girl and an old woman entirely at ease with her lot in life. Regarding the latter: several verbal remarks indicate otherwise but Streep plays them more like canned instinctual responses; They come from the character's simple humor and are uttered primarily for her sister Rhonda's benefit.

It's Rhonda who harbors more illwill toward their showbiz history. The famous Altman overlapping dialogue aids Lily and Meryl in detailing this sister act. Yolanda and Rhonda have spent their entire lives together and the actresses ably sell this. They're constantly talking to each other, but it's a well rehearsed decades-long togetherness: their minds are free to float elsewhere knowing that they'll always return to one another.

Yolanda's primary concerns are her death-obsessed daughter (whom she clearly worries about but takes joy in) and Garrison Keillor, the host of the show. You realize through her shift in demeanor with the host that she has either loved or romanced him before the events of the film takes place --Streep shows you this with simple glances even before the dialogue confirms your suspicions. She makes this dead romance her best running gag in the film, mining it for abundant laughs that a lesser actor wouldn't even know where to find let alone amplify.

By the time Streep hits the stage you're already completely aware of this woman's personality and her circumstantial simplicity (this life as a midlevel sister act is the only life she's ever known.) And, then in her vocal performances onstage she just keeps on deepening those initial impressions while giving a musical performance, full of idiosyncratic feeling and beauty.



As in all the best ensemble pictures, the performances of other actors inform each individual turn as well. In a great moment backstage Yolanda, realizing Rhonda is upset about a story they've been retelling, sings an old familiar tune and embraces her sister. When the tune ends, Rhonda tearfully says "singing is the only thing that ever puts me right". She's talking about herself but in Meryl's exuberant, silly, and vocally powerful stage performance that follows, you realize the same is true for her. They're peas in this showbiz pond. Singing also puts Yolanda right.

In so many melancholy and bittersweet ways Robert Altman's last film was a farewell. Casting America's most enduring Great Actress in this role made it sweeter. In the film's last scene the sisters and friends gab around a table about the departed radio show. Yolanda, giggling and reminiscing, is determined to jumpstart a farewell tour...

I love doing that last show. I just wanna do one last show and then another until I'm in a wheelchair. I just wanna keep doing 'em.

The Angel of Death (Virginia Madsen) enters this final sequence and smiles benevolently at these principal players corking Yolanda's infectiously loud joy. You realize immediately that one day all of us will give our last performance. One day all of these actors will be gone, even this beloved goddess of the cinema. Feel free to tear up. It's a testament to the film that the feeling is still somehow a good one.

Meryl Streep is now in her early sixties. She's been knocking her performances out of the park for thirty plus years and there's no reason not to hope for thirty more. She'll keep giving one last great performance until they put her in a wheelchair. She's gonna keep giving 'em.



'Streep at 60' Performance Write-Ups:
Julia, The Deer Hunter, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Plenty, Death Becomes Her, The River Wild, Music of the Heart and The Devil Wears Prada.

Oscar Nominations Discussed:
78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 95, 98, 99, 02 and 06

Patricia Neal (1926-2010)

Sad news. The Oscar winning actress Patricia Neal (Hud) has passed away at 84. She had been battling lung cancer. Neal had a memorably husky voice and something like tragedy in her beautiful eyes. And that was even before tragedy hit.

She first hit screens in the late 40s but the 1960s were a particularly volatile time for the great actress. Consider the Everest sized career peaks and tragic personal valleys: In 1960 she was co-starring with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in the Broadway hit The Miracle Worker (she didn't travel with them to the film version); Her infant son's carriage was hit by a taxi in 1961 (he survived); her seven year old daughter died suddenly in 1962; in 1963 Hud was released; In April 1964 she won the Oscar for that indelible housekeeper role (she did not attend the ceremony); in 1965 while pregnant with her fifth and last child, she suffered a multiple stroke that put her in a coma for three weeks. Miraculously her daughter was born healthy months later. But Neal had to learn to walk and talk again. She felt she had to pass on The Graduate (which became a classic role for former co-star Anne Bancroft) due to the recovery period but she returned to film twice in 1968 for the short documentary about her rehabilitation Pat Neal is Back and the drama The Subject Was Roses. She received her second (and last) nomination for Best Actress for the latter.

Neal didn't work so often late in life but made a memorable appearance as the title character in Robert Altman Cookie's Fortune (1999). Her death in that film -- was it a murder or suicide? -- causes abundant family infighting (Glenn Close is such a bitch!) and comic confusion (Julianne Moore is rather dim).

How many Oscar winners get to be played by other Oscar winners? Not even Katharine Hepburn got that (since Cate Blanchett hadn't won yet when she acted out the role in The Aviator). Neal's life was dramatized in 1981 for a telefilm called "The Patricia Neal Story" starring two time winner Glenda Jackson.

Glenda Jackson as Neal and Dirk Bogarde as her husband,
author Roald Dahl (yes, that Roald Dahl), in "The Patricia Neal Story"

Do you have any favorite Patricia Neal movie memories? Please share them as I need viewing tips. Apart from the 1960s films, I'm afraid I'm not that familiar with her work.

With co-star/lover Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead (1949)
And with Paul Newman in Hud (1963)

Please tell me you've seen Hud (1963), though. If not, it should be your absolute tippity top rental priority. I don't care what your priority was before. Guy Lodge recently called Hud 'hard, precise, ineffably sad' in a tweet and I marvelled at his own precision with that description. The movie is insanely good and should've won the Best Picture Oscar (that it wasn't nominated for). It's one of the best movies of the 1960s... or any decade for that matter. Though her screen time is limited, Neal is magnificent in her crucially observant sideline role.
*

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Showgirls

The concept of this series is such: I choose a movie. We all choose our favorite shot(s) from said movie. I link up to everyone's choices each Wednesday. It's an eye candy free for all celebrating those single images in movies that we just can't live without. They're either the prettiest, the most telling, personally resonant, quite unexpected or just plain delightful.

Today's episode: Paul Verhoeven's gaudy masterwork SHOWGIRLS (1995). It's loud. It's trashy. It's colorful. It's spectacularly itself. Something all movies should strive to be. So, very briefly, I considered this shot from the opening sequence.


Because the "HUGE" graphic makes me giggle. It can't have been an accident that that's the word that flashes in neon just as Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) pulls into Las Vegas. "I'm gonna win."

I almost went with anything from Nomi's first performance like these.


I love how distorted and fleshy the first image is (that's the movie, too) and that Nomi is a blur. Isn't she the spazziest (live action) protagonist of all time? She's basically a rampaging toddler and definitely the most inelegant "dancer" ever captured on film. It's not just that famous pool sex scene that's epileptic. This girl seems constantly beset by seizures, whether she's throwing fries, hitting friends, dancing or lapdancing, shoving innocent human resources personnel against walls, eating potato-chips, buying dresses from "ver-sayce" or running out into oncoming traffic (which she does at least twice during the movie). The second image is unexpectedly demure as she prepares to strip. Aren't the pinks and yellows gorgeous? It's not deep focus (shame) but it's wonderfully composed to allow you to see Cristal's (Gina Gershon) volcanic entrance at the same time in the background.

Speaking of backgrounds. There's so much going on in some of the frames, so many characters milling about with their own stories and agendas that I'm not even joking when I say that it occasionally feels like a Robert Altman movie... if the master had constantly snorted cocaine rather than puffed Mary Jane.


Some of the chaotic teeming energy is undoubtedly aided by the use of long takes. Thankfully Verhoeven lets DP Jost Vacano's camera roam around the room in a few key sequences rather than relying on a million edits. We love long takes, yes we do. Way too few filmmakers ever think to use them.

But I finally had to settle on my favorite dance sequence for the best shot. It's the climax of sorts (though Showgirls really doesn't know when to quit -- abbreviate the two major subplots involving a rapist rocker and a womanizing choreographer and the movie is suddenly zippier), which finally brings our two anti-heroines together in costume, though they've rehearsed this number alone before in one of the movie's very best scenes.


To me that just says it all. It's a blue movie (pun intended), the anti-heroines are dressed identically "You and I... we're exactly the same" but their expressions are so different. Cristal is your devious delicious Bitch Goddess (the name of the show within the show), Nomi is the bizarrely innocent whore/plaything.

Come on, slave girl.

Now, this slave girl is about to push her master down those monster stairs but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

You know the best advice I ever got? You're up there on stage, hoping on a spot. Someone gets in your way, step on 'em. If you're the only one left standing there, they hire you.

That's about it. Thank you and good night, ladies and gentlemen. Elvis has left the building.

'...Best Shot' Players
Give it up for these whores dancers! You click the link. You see the post. They show you what you want to see...

• My New Plaid Pants ass + palm trees + vomiting dolphins... "It doesn't suck!"
• Nick's Flick Picks ♪ listen all of y'all this is sabotage!
  
• Antagony & Ecstasy the solar plexus as phallus? Whaaa
• missemmamm honors Nomi's relentless thumbs and (starry) eyes
  
• Stale Popcorn "the creature from Nomi's Lagoon" great writeup
• vg21random believes in the hair & makeup. I agree. (In fact, I 100% believe that this movie deserved a few Oscar nods: makeup and Gina Gershon as Best Supporting Actress being the two most egregious snubs.)
  

 Other Films in This Series

• Angels in America (2003)
• X-Men (2000)
• Bring It On (2000)
• Black Narcissus (1946)
• A Face in the Crowd (1957)
• Pandora's Box (1929)
• Se7en (1995) 
• Requiem for a Dream (2000)

*