Helen Hill Books Into the Library of Congress

I had a fight with the Missus last night over whether the sun is hot or something, the landlord is in proud possession of a check that's going to bounce in two days unless I get $150 from the rent fairy, and I have this sinus infection that feels as if somebody did a lobotomy on me and forget to remove the ice pick when he was finished, so I really wasn't planning on being happy about anything today. Leave it to the National Film Registry to fuck that up. Every year the Library of Congress selects twenty-five films deemed to be of "artistic, cultural, or historical interest" for permanent preservation, and this year's bounty includes Scratch and Crow, a 1995 student film by the late, great Helen Hill, who was a friend of mine and the best person I have ever known who I did not address as "Grandmother."

Among the other films on the list, all of them thrilled to bursting at being seen in Helen's company, are Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, Al Pacino bringing it in Dog Day Afternoon, the Bette Davis-William Wyler classic Jezebel, the 1911 Winsor McKay animation Little Nemo, the remarkable and only recently restored The Exiles, the lovable sci-fi fantasy The Incredible Shrinking Man, the Michael Jackson music video "Thriller", Chuck Workman's classic clip montage Precious Images, the Roy Rogers vehicle Under Western Stars, and the awesome independent cartoonist Sally Cruikshank's Quasi at the Quackadero. There's also Mrs. Miniver, which must have been deemed historically significant as all the bedamned to make up for its artistic and cultural failings, but then, the National Film Registry doesn't check with me about shit.


I apologize for the pettiness that often made Helen roll her eyes but, such was her loyal spirit, never caused her to hide behind a lamppost or pretend she didn't know me, even after security guards had been summoned. This is a happy day for everyone who's had something to do with keeping Helen's name and work alive, among them Helen's dashing brother Jake, her widower Paul Gailiunas, our invaluable mututal friend Jenny Davidson, Dan Streible and the sainted orphan film movement, and Peripheral Produce, which has made a DVD compilation of Helen's work, including Scratch and Crow and her masterpiece Mouseholes, available. It may seem that the preservation of the creative work of someone who was taken from us too cruelly soon is an odd thing to clutch onto as a hopeful sign for the year to come, but at this point, I'll take what I can get.

David Levine, R.I.P.

David Levine, noble practitioner of that most noble of all professions, drawing grotesque pictures of prominent people, has died, a week after his eighty-third birthday. Over the course of almost forty-five years and nine presidential administrations, doing his have-pen-will-sit-here act for The New York Review of Books, he was the man responsible for showing us the portraits they, like Dorian Gray, preferred to keep hidden in the attic. (Of course, he was also commissioned to do work for other outlets, not all of whom wanted nothing to do with what he eventually offered them--such as The New York Times, which in 1979 said thanks, but no thanks, to this caricature of Henry Kissinger as the illustrated man:



Of course, this is a glib assessment of Levine's body of work: he ran thousands of drawings in the Review, in the process creating a handy breakdown of just about every notable historical, literary, or political figure you could think of, his or her image boiled down to its witty essence. He was the heart and soul of the magazine, and it is to be expected that the Review will see his death as the chance to give his memory an indulgent pat while taking a bow for having supplied him with an on-running gallery. In the meantime, David Margolick had the story of how, in Levine's declining years, the Review continued to recycle and financially exploit his work while insulting his legacy by hiring a bad imitator, express bewilderment that anyone might think that he'd earned some kind of consideration for a pension and generally assure him that it was raining while it pissed on his shoes.

Crazy Aunt Film Review

My crazy aunt called to tell me she'd seen Invictus, or as she calls it, "that new Clint Eastwood movie with the nutty title." Her verdict on the picture, which stars Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela: "It was pretty good, but it wasn't really what we were expecting. You could see the places where they felt they had to be 'politically correct' and all. For instance, they didn't try to cover up the fact that he'd spent a lot of time in prison, but they never did tell you what he'd done that was so bad that they had to lock him up for so long."

Reeling in the Years

The Nerve list of the best movies of the past ten years is a collaborative effort, with titles selected (by Scott Von Doviak, the real brains behind the enterprise), from a pool of nominees, based on how many of us agreed on their virtues and how enthusiastically less unanimous contenders were championed by those who had given them a piece of their heart. I think it turned out dandy, but here, for the record, is what my own top-twenty ballot looks like:


1. CHILDREN OF MEN (2006; dir. Alfonso Cuaron)

2. THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007; dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

3. PAN'S LABYRINTH (2006; dir. Guillermo del Toro)

4. SPIRITED AWAY (2002; dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

5. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (2001; dir. Alfonso Cuaron)

6 ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004; dir. Michel Gondry)

7. WALL-E (2008; dir. Andrew Stanton)

8. 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002; dir. Michael Winterbottom)

9. THE HURT LOCKER (2009; dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

10. HAMLET (2000; dir. Michael Almereyda)

11. HEAD-ON (2004; dir. Fatih Akin)

12. MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2007; dir. David Lynch)

13. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2001; dir. Julian Schnable)

14. AMORES PERROS (2000; dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)

15. THE BEST OF YOUTH (2003; dir. Marco Tullio Giordana)

16. SIDEWAYS (2004; dir. Alexander Payne)

17. THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy (2001-2003; dir. Peter Jackson)

18. ZODIAC (2007; dir. David Fincher)

19. GHOST WORLD (2001; dir. Terry Zwigoff)

20. THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (2003; dir. Sylvain Chomet)

I also had an especially good time, at some point in a theater between January 2000 and a week or so ago, at the following:

Gun Shy (dir. Eric Blakeney); American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron); Reindeer Games (dir. John Frankenheimer); Mission to Mars (dir. Brian De Palma); High Fidelity (dir. Stephen Frears); Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park); Praise (dir. John Curran); The Filth and the Fury (dir. Julien Temple); Alice and Martin (dir. Andre Techine); Croupier (dir. Mike Hodges); Dark Days (dir. Marc Singer); Final Destination (dir. James Wong); Getting to Know You (dir. Lisanne Skyler); Groove (dir. Greg Harrison); Jesus' Son (dir. Alison Maclean); The Original Kings of Comedy (dir. Spike Lee); Girlfight (dir. Karyn Kusama); Ratcatcher (dir. Lynne Ramsay); Calle 54 (Fernando Trueba); Animal Factory (dir. Steve Buscemi); Best in Show (Christopher Guest); The Way of the Gun (dir. Christopher McQuarrie); The Yards (dir. John Gray); Requiem for a Dream (dir. Darren Aronofsky); Yi Yi (dir. Edward Yang); You Can Count on Me (dir. Kenneth Lonergan); Before Night Falls (dir. Julian Schnabel)

The Pledge (dir. Sean Penn); Mokeybone (dir. Henry Selick); Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan); In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar-wei); The Claim (dir. Michael Winterbottom); The Tailor of Panama (dir. John Boorman); The Circle (Jafar Panahi); Lift (dirs. DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter); The Gleaners and I (dir. Agnes Varda); Sexy Beast (dir. Jonathan Glazer); Pootie Tang (dir. Louis C. K.>); Lumumba (Raoul Peck); The Devil's Backbone (dir. Guillermo del Toro); Ginger Snaps (dir. John Fawcett); Va Savoir (dir. Jacques Rivette); Intimacy (Patrice Chéreau); Waking Life (dir. Richard Linklater); Faat-Kine (dir. Ousmane Sembène); No Man's Land (dir. Danis Tanovic); Monsters, Inc. (dir. Pete Docter); Gosford Park (dir. Robert Altman); Trembling Before G_d (dir. Sandi Simcha Dubowski); Lantana (Ray Lawrence); Ali (dir. Michael Mann); Cure (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa); Nine Queens (dir. Fabián Bielinsky); Last Orders (dir. Fred Schepisi); What Time Is It There? (dir. Ming-liang Tsai); The Good Thief (dir. Neil Jordan); Lovely & Amazing (dir. Nicole Holofcener)

Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (dir. Lee Hirsch); Horns & Halos (dirs. Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky); Man on the Train (dir. Patrice Leconte); Love and Diane (dir. Jennifer Dworkin); Winged Migration (dir. Jacques Perrin); Stevie (dir. Steve James); Rivers and Tides (dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer); Spider (dir. David Cronenberg); Raising Victor Vargas (dir. Peter Sollett); The Triumph of Love (dir. Clare Peploe); Time Out (dir. Laurent Cantet); Lawless Heart (dir. Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter); The Man without a Past (dir. Aki Kauriskamki); Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (dir. Shinichirô Watanabe); Dogtown and Z-Boys (dir. Stacy Peralta); Domestic Violence (dir. Frederick Wiseman); The Cockettes (dirs. Bill Weber and David Weissman); Remembrance of Things to Come (dirs. Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker) Insomnia (dir. Christopher Nolan); Millennium Actress (dir. Satoshi Kon); Marion Bridge (dir. Wiebke von Carolsfeld); Pistol Opera (dir. Seijun Suzuki); Lost in Translation (dir. Sofia Coppola); Goodbye, Dragon Inn (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang); Final Destination 2 (dir. David R. Ellis); The Case of the Grinning Cat (dir. Chris Marker); Chop Suey (dir. Bruce Weber); Persons of Interest (dir. Alison Maclean); Untold Story (dir. Lee Jae-yong)

Spellbound (dir. Jeffrey Blitz); Blade II (dir. Guillermo del Toro); Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (dir. Guy Maddin); Capturing the Friedmans (dir. Andrew Jarecki); X2 (dir. Bryan Singer); The Weather Underground (dir. Sam Green and Bill Siegel); 28 Days Later (dir. Danny Boyle); Finding Nemo (dirs. Andrew Stanton and Lee Ulrich); The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (dir. Peter Care); Lilo & Stitch Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders); Me Without You (dir. Sandra Goldbacher); K-19: The Widowmaker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow): Minority Report (dir. Steven Spielberg); The Magdalene Sisters (dir. Peter Mullan); Mostly Martha (dir. Sandra Nettelbeck); The Station Agent (dir. Thomas McCarthy); Balseros (dirs. Carlos Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech); Thirteen (dir. Catherine Hardwicke); Rabbit-Proof Fence (dir. Phillip Noyce); The Good Girl (dir. Miguel Arteta); Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (dir. Shane Meadows); Dog Days (dir. Ulrich Seidl); Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (dir. Helen Stickler); The Son (dirs. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne); American Splendor (dirs. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini); Dirty Pretty Things (dir. Stephen Frears); The Pinochet Case (dir. Patrico Guzman); Songs from the Second Floor (dir. Roy Andersson); Punch Drunk Love (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson); How to Draw a Bunny (dir. John W. Walter); Solaris (dir. Steven Soderbergh); Talk to Her (dir. Pedro Almodovar); Bloody Sunday (dir. Paul Greengrass); Femme Fatale (dir. Brian De Palma); Far from Heaven (dir. Todd Haynes); Paid in Full (dir. Charles Stone III); Catch Me If You Can (dir. Steven Spielberg); Morvern Callar (dir. Lynne Ramsay); Personal Velocity (dir. Rebecca Miller); Drumline (dir. Charles Stone III); Face (dir. Bertha Bay-Sa Pan); Code Unknown (dir. Michael Haneke); The Company (dir. Robert Altman)

In This World (dir. Michael Winterbottom); Intolerable Cruelty (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen); Bus 174 (dir. José Padilha); Morning Sun (dirs. Geramie Barme, Richard Gordon, and Carma Hinton); Shattered Glass (dir. Billy Ray); My Architect (dir. Nathaniel Kahn); Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (dir. Peter Weir); 21 Grams (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu); Bad Santa (dir. Terry Zwigoff); In America (dir. Jim Sheridan); Pieces of April (dir. Peter Hedges); Tokyo Godfathers (dir. Satoshi Kon); Touching the Void (dir. Kevin Macdonald); Teacher's Pet (dir. Timothy Björklund); Blind Shaft (dir. Yang Li); Made-Up (dir. Tony Shalhoub); Abouna (dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun); Greendale (dir. Neil Young); Never Die Alone (dir. Ernest Dickerson); Son Prere (dir. Patrice Chéreau); Hellboy (dir. Guillermo del Toro); This So-Called Disaster (dir. Michael Almereyda); The Saddest Music in the World (dir. Guy Maddin); The Clay Bird (dir. Tareque Masud); Kill Bill (dir. Quentin Tarantino); The Agronomist (dir. Jonathan Demme); Strayed (dir. André Téchiné); The Five Obstructions (dirs. Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier); The Mother (dir. Roger Michll); Bukowski: Born into This (dir. John Dullaghan); Imedla (dir. Ramona S. Diaz); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (dir. Alfonso Cuaron); I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (dir. Mike Hodges); Savinf Face (dir. Alice Wu); The Sea Inside (dir. Alejandro Amenábar); Infernal Affairs (dis. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak); End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (dirs. Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia); Torremolinos 73 (dir. Pablo Berger); Tom Dowd and the Language of Music (dir. Mark Moormann)




The Mayor of the Sunset Strip (dir. George Hickenlooper); The Hunting of the President (dirs. Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason); Spiderman 2 (dir. Sam Raimi); Before Sunset (dir. Richard Linklater); Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (dirs. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Singofsky); Bright Leaves (dir. Ross McElwee); Riding Giants (dir. Stacy Peralta); Festival Express (dirs. Bob Smeaton and Frank Cvitanovich); Last Life in the Universe (dir. Pen-Ek Ratanaruang); Los Angeles Plays Itself (dir. Thom Anderson); Collateral (dir. Michael Mann); Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (dir. Robert Stone); Intermission (dir. John Crowley); House of Flying Daggers (dir. Yimou Zhang); Ocean's Twelve (dir. Steven Soderbergh); Mr. 3000 (dir. Charles Stone III); Bright Future (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa); The Bad News Bears (dir. Richard Linklater); Tarnation (dir. Jonathan Caouette); The Incredibles (dir. Brad Bird); The Best Thief in the World (dir. Jacob Kornbluth); Kitchen Stories (dir. Bent Hamer); Funny Ha Ha (dir. Andrew Bujalski); Kill Zone (dir. Wilson Yip); Infernal Affairs 2 (dirs. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak); The Dancer Upstairs (dir. John Malkovich); The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (dir. Judy Irving)

Cellular (dir. David R. Ellis); Kinsey (dir. Bill Condon); Kung Fu Hustle (dir. Stephen Chow); Look at Me (dir. Agnès Jaoui); Nobody Knows (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda); Shaun of the Dead (dir. Edgar Wright); A Very Long Engagement (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet); We Don't Live Here Anymore (dir. John Curran); Batman Begins (dir. Christopher Nolan); Land of the Dead (dir. George R. Romero); Down in the Valley (dir. Davod Jacobsen); Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (dir. Fatih Akin); Rank (dir. John Hyams); Munich (dir. Steven Spielberg); The Skeleton Key (dir. Iain Softley); Red Eye (dir. Wes Craven); The Constant Gardener (dir. Fernando Meirelles); Oliver Twist (dir. Roman Polanski); Capote (dir. Bennett Miller); Duma (dir. Carroll Ballard); Munich (dir. Steven Spielberg); The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (dir. Tommy Lee Jones); Corpse Bride (dirs. Mike Johnston and Tim Burton); Happy Here and Now (dir. Michael Almereyda); A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater); Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (dirs. Paul Crowder and John Dower); Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee); Excellent Cadavers (dir. Marco Turco); I Like Killing Flies (dir. Matt Mahurin); The Color of Olives (dir. Carolina Rivas); Little Mis Sunshine (dirs. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris); Quincinera (dirs. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland); Half Nelson (dir. Ryan Fleck); Factotum (dir. Bent Hamer); Man Push Cart (dir. Ramin Bahrani); Lassie (dir. Charles Sturridge); Good Morning, Night (dir. Marco Bellocchio); Police Beat (dir. Robinson Devors); Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (dir. Danny Leiner); Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (dir. Peter Elkind, Alex Gibney, and Bethany McLean); A Prairie Home Companion (dir. Robert Altman); The Far Side of the Moon (dir. Robert Lepage); The President's Last Bang (dir. Im Sang-soo)

This Film Is Rated R (dir. Kirby Dick); Le Petit Lieutenant (dir. Xavier Beaujois); Jesus Camp (dirs. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady); The Science of Sleep (dir. Michel Gondry); The Ground Truth (dir. Patricia Foulkrod); The Queen (dir. Stephen Frears); 51 Birch Street (dir. Doug Block); Deliver Us from Evil (dir. Amy Berg); Volver (dir. Pedro Almodovar); Casino Royale (dir. Martin Campbell); The History Boys (dir. Nicholas Hynter); Iraq in Fragments (dir. James Longley); The Aura (dir. Fabián Bielinsky); Happy Feet (dirs. George Miller and Warren Coleman); Blood Diamond (dir. Edward Zwick); The Painted Veil (dir. John Curran); Requiem (dir. Hans-Christian Schmid); Days of Glory (dir. Rachid Bouchareb); Tristram Shandy (dir. Michael Winterbottom); Ballets Russes (dirs. Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine); 40 Shades of Blue (dir. Ira Sachs); My Summer of Love (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski); Rize (dir. David LaChapelle); Darwin's Nightmare (dir. Hubert Sauper); Grizzly Man (dir. Werner Herzog); 3-Iron (dir.); Mysterious Skin (dir. Gregg Aracki); Moolade (dir. Ousmane Sembene); Peter Pan (dir. P. J. Hogan): My Mother's Smile (dir. Marco Bellocchio); Pulse (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa); Bright Young Things (dir. Stephen Fry)



DiG! (dir. Ondi Timoner); Oldboy (dir. Chan-Wook Park); Sir! No Sir! (dir. Davd Zweig); Dave Chapelle's Block Party (dir. Michel Gondry); Neil Young: Heart of Gold (dir. Jonathan Demme); Duck Season (dir. Fernando Eimbcke); L'Enfant (dirs. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne); Serenity (dir. Joss Whedon); Wall (dir. Simone Bitton); Memories of Murder (dir. Joon-ha Bong); Whisky (dirs. Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll); The Beat That My Heart Skipped (dir. Jacques Audiard); Sunset Story (dir. Laura Gabbert) : Cowards Bend the Knee (dir. Guy Maddin); Happy Endings (dir. Don Roos); Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (dir. Mamoru Oshii): Woman Is the Future of Man (dir. Sang-soo Hong); Breakfast on Pluto (dir. Neil Jordan); After Innocence (dir. Jesscia Sanders); Kings and Queen (dir. Arnaud Desplechin); Junebug (dir. Phil Morrison); Miami Vice (dir. Michael Mann); Brick (dir. Rian Johnson); Touch the Sound (dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer); East of Harlem (dirs. Emilia Menocal and Jauretsi Saizarbitoria); Decomposition of the Soul (dirs. Massimo Iannetta and Nina Toussaint); The Cats of Mirikitani dir. Linda Hattendorf); The Host (dir. Joon-ha Bong); Air Guitar Nation (dir. Alexandra Lipsitz); Offside (dir. Jafar Panahi); The Lookout(dir. Scott Frank); Year of the Dog (dir. Mike White); Rock the Bells (dirs. Denis Hennelly and Casey Suchan): Death Proof (dir. Quentin Tarantino); Election (dir. Johnnie To): Triad Election (dir. Johnnie To); Diggers (dir. Katherine Dieckmann); Poison Friends( dir. Emmanuel Bourdieu); Once (dir. John Carney); Paprika (dir. Satoshi Kon); The Golden Door (dir. Emanuele Crialese); Knocked Up (dir. Judd Apatpw); 12:08 East of Bucharest (dir. Corneliu Porumboiu); Gypsy Caravan (dir. Jasmine Dellal); The Real Dirt on Farmer John (dir. Taggart Siegel); Ratatouille (dir. Brad Bird); El Crimen Ferpecto (dir. Álex de la Iglesia): Dynamite Warrior (dir. Chalerm Wongpim); No End in Sight (dir. Charles Ferguson); Fido (dir. Andrew Currie); This Is England (dir. Shane Meadows); The Devil Came on Horseback (dirs. Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg); Alice Neel (dir. Andrew Neel); William Eggleston in the Real World (dir. Michael Almereyda)

Blame It on Fidel (dir. Julie Gavras); The Simpsons Movie (dir. David Silverman); Deep Water (dirs. Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell); The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (dir. Seth Gordon); Pride & Prejudice (dir. Joe Wright); Exiled (dir. Johnnie To); In the Shadow of the Moon (dir. David Sington); The Rape of Europa (dirs. Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham); Banished (dir. Marco Williams); Michael Clayton (dir. Tony Gilroy); Control (dir. Anton Corbijn); Gone Baby Gone (dir. Ben Affleck); Wristcutters: A Love Story (dir. Goran Dukic); Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (dir. Sidney Lumet); Darkbluealmostblack (dir. Daniel Sánchez Arévalo ); The Savages (dir. Tamara Jenkins); Sweeney Todd (dir. Tim Burton); Persepolis (dirs. Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi); Summer Palace (dir. Ye Lou); Taxi to the Dark Side (dir. Alex Gibney); 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (dir. Cristian Mungiu); The Witnesses (dir. Andre Techine); The Duchess of Langeais (dir. Jacques Rivette); Full Battle Rattle (dirs. Tiny Gerber and Jesse Moss); Chop Shop (dir. Ramin Bahrani); Sputnik Mania (dir. David Hoffman); Jellyfish (dirs. Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret); Up the Yangtze (dir. Yung Chang); The Edge of Heaven (dir. Fatih Akin); Kung Fu Panda (dirs. Mark Osborne and John Stevenson); The Go-Getter (dir. Martin Hynes); My Winnipeg (dir. Guy Maddin); Encounters at the End of the World (dir. Werner Herzog); The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan); Before I Forget (dir. Jacques Nolot); Man on Wire (dir. James Marsh); The Order of Myths (dir. Margaret Brown); Patti Smith: Dream of Life (dir. Steven Sebring); Trouble the Water (dirs. Carl Deal and Tia Lessen); Ghost Town (dir. David Koepp); Iron Man (dir. Jon Favreau); Tropic Thunder (dir. Ben Stiller); Let the Right One in (dir. Tomas Alfredson); The Class (dir. Laurent Cantet); Up the Yangtze (dir. Yung Chang); Idiocracy (dir. Mike Judge); The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky); Playing (dir. Eduardo Coutinho); Dear Zachary: A Letter to His Son About His Father (dir. Kurt Kuenne); Pray the Devil Back to Hell (dir. Gini Reticker); A Christmas Tale (dir. Arnaud Desplechin); Cadillac Records (dir. Darnell Martin); Synecdoche, NY (dir. Charlie Kaufman); The Secret of the Grain (dir. Abdel Kechiche); Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman); Splinter (dir. Toby Wilkins); Sita Sings the Blues (dir. Nina Paley); Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (dor. Alex Gibney); Away from Her (dir. Sarah Polley); Chris & Don: A Love Story (dirs. Guido Santi and Tina Mascara)

California Dreamin' (dir. Cristian Nemescu); Coraline (dir. Henry Selick); Two Lovers (dir. James Gray); Everlasting Moments (dir. Jan Troell); Tokyo Sonata (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa); Goodbye Solo (dir. Ramin Bahrani); Duplicity (dir. Tony Gilroy); American Swing (dirs. Jon Hart and Matthew Kaufman); Adventureland (dir. Greg Mottola); Sugar (dirs. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck); Forbidden Lie$ (dir. Anna Broinowski); Anvil! The Story of Anvil (dir. Sacha Gervasi); Treeless Mountain (dir. So Yong Kim); Star Trek (dir. J. J. Abrams); Drag Me to Hell (dir. Sam Raimi); Up (dir. Pete Docter); Julia (dir. Erick Zonka); The Brothers Bloom (dir. Rian Johnson); O'Horten (dir. Bent hamer); Afghan Star (dir. Havana Marking); Public Enemies (dir, Michael Mann); The Beaches of Agnes (dir. Agnes Varda); A Woman in Berlin (dir. Max Färberböck); Import Export (dir. Ulrich Seidl); You, the Living (dir. Roy Andersson); Soul Power (dir. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte); Tony Manero (dir. Pablo Larrain); The English Surgeon (dir. Geoffrey Smith); Not Quite Hollywood (dir. Mark Hartley); Ponyo (dir. Hayao Miyazaki); Passing Strange (dir. Spike Lee); Inglourious Basterds (dir. Quentin Tarantino); A Perfect Getaway (dir. David Twohy); Unmade Beds (dir. Alexis Dos Santos); The Sun (dir. Aleksandr Sokurov); Home (dir. Ursula Meier); Fantastic Mr. Fox (dir. Wes Anderson); La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris (dir. Frederick Wiseman); Me and Orson Welles (dir. Richard Linklater); I'm Gonna Explode (dir. Gerardo Naranjo_; Brothers (dir. Jim Sheridan); The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (dir. Rebecca Miller); Police, Adjective (dir. Corneliu Porumboiu); The Messenger (dir. Oren Moverman); Up in the Air (dir. Jason Reitman); Big River Man (dir. John Maringouin).



Movies are a collaborative medium, but the "(dir.___)" thing is still one of the easiest ways to make clear which one you're talking about when your conversation includes references to many obscurities, many of which may have the same title as any number of other obscurities. That said, it might be helpful to set aside a separate category for movies that would have been a far sight less memorable without the central performers who basically carried them on their back to the finish line, such performers as Daniel Auteuil in Sade (dir. Benoit Jacquot), Sylvie Testud and Julie-Marie Parmentier in Murderous Maids (dir. Jean-Pierre Denis), Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary (dir. Steven Shainberg), Ryan Gosling in The Believer (dir. Henry Bean), Michael Caine in The Quiet American (dir. Phillip Noyce), John Malkovich in Ripley's Game (dir. Liliana Cavani), Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday (dir. Mark Walters), Toni Collette in Japanese Story (dir. Sue Brooks), Annette Bening in Being Juila (dir. István Szabó), Peter O'Toole in Venus (dir. Roger Michell); Anna Faris in Smiley Face (dir. Gregg Araki), Frank Langella in Starting Out in the Evening (dir. Andrew Wagner); Ellen Page in damn near anything; and Jeff Bridges in the new Crazy Heart (dir. Scott Cooper).

Improbably enough, the above list does have its share of omissions. I have tried, though not to exclude anything (well, except for Zoolander--oops) on the grounds that it might get me hooted at, even though it's been my experience that people will judge you more harshly for liking a movie they hated (or vice versa) than they will for having views that differ from theirs on such topics as whether the CIA killed Kennedy or gun ownership should be mandatory. I was more inclined to let something go because it's so well-known: I can't imagine there's anyone who hasn't seen Borat yet because he's been waiting for me to give him the go-ahead. Even so, at a point early in my list-making, the size of the thing began to seem pretty sobering, especially since I know that a list of the movies I saw in the last ten years that I hated or that left me on the fence or that I had no strong reaction to either way would be at least twice as long. I didn't deliberately set out to see this many movies in ten years, and there were many nights, when funds were low and I had to make a choice between seeing something that was about to leave town that sounded fascinating or having dinner, when I kind of hated seeing another one. And it's not as if I don't have other interests. But so does Gore Vidal, and it was he who wrote, "The only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies."



[The author (upper-right-hand corner) in his younger, more ebulliently carefree days]

I decided that I liked going to the movies early in life, the first couple of times my mom smuggled me out of the house to see Dumbo and 101 Dalmations. I didn't realize then how seldom the experience was going to be repeated during my childhood, and I didn't really start racking up even modest numbers as a moviegoer until after I'd gotten the hell out of Mississippi. It wasn't until I landed in New Orleans that I experienced what it was like to live in a city that had any kind of movie culture at all, even one where those who set the local priorities and tone were aware enough of the existence of movie freaks to be hostile to their needs and desires. When I arrived, New Orleans had a single, much-beloved "art house", the single-screen Prytania, which did its damndest to schedule a run for everything that came out that the local commercial multiplexes had no interest in, even if that meant sometimes booking a movie for three days. (They used to print up map-like calendars, each of them covering a few months' worth of programming. You'd take one home, pin it up on the wall, and check it every day to make sure you didn't miss something that you'd put a dent in the rent money to see.)

As a movie town, New Orleans began to change for the worst the year after I decided to settle there. First the Robert E. Lee, a gorgeous single-screener, shut down, then the Prytania announced that it was turning into a second-run commercial theater. In response to poisonous public reaction, they did revert back to a semblance of their former identity, but they stopped printing those calendars, and things were never quite the same again. Within another couple of years, the college repertory screenings had dried up, too. In retrospect, I should have thought about moving on by then, but an inability to commit has never been one of my failings; instead, I dug in my heels and, like a stoic discarded suitor watching his dream girl cavorting in a fountain with her lout of the month, patiently waited for my object of beauty to come to her senses. By the time I lost my job in 2001 and my then-girlfriend dragged me out to New York, even the multiplexes in New Orleans were turning up their toes.

I guess it goes without saying that when I hit New York, I hit the ground running and never looked back. It says something about my timing that I was living the life I'd always dreamed of, hot-footing it from theater to theater, just when the rest of the world was settling in to watch everything on DVD or Video on Demand or the Internet. I have no objection to these exciting new avenues of distribution but would hate to see them ever supplant the theater-going experience entirely. The key phrase, as Brother Gore knows, is "go to the movies." I still have dreams, at least as well-founded as John W. Hinkley's plans to someday hold Jodie close to him while they watch the grandchildren open their presents on Christmas morn, of making my own damn movie, and it would not do to have it premiere on the web, though I expect that I could find a way to live with it being attached to the words "A Showtime Original" after the screaming dies down. But in one's heart of hearts, one wants the full treatment, a slowly darkening room full of people and an anticipatory mood that you could cut with a knife, and then the cheers, the applause, the screams of "Auteur! Autuer!" Or, at least, the explosion of raucous laughter. As Vidal's great friend and colleague Tennessee Williams used to say, if they laugh, it's a comedy.

The one big gap in my moviegoing for the decade is James Cameron's Avatar. I have nothing to say about it, which is my usual approach when dealing with movies I haven't seen yet, except to say that I suppose I'll get around to it after the kids are back in school and out of the theaters. Right now, the reactions I've heard from people I know and respect who've seen it have been all over the map, from "It's amazing!" to "It's fun, the flying dragons are cool" to "It was like being stabbed in the eyes for three hours." But I'll admit to being a little bemused at the pre-release hoopla over it, and at the level of deep, defensive emotional commitment that it seemed to inspire in people who had scarcely seen a frame of it. I've seen this kind of reaction before, and am old enough to remember a time when it was generated in response to a movie--say, Apocalypse Now--that people hoped would have something meaningful to say about their own confused and confusing times. In the age of George Lucas, it's been more common to see it from people who saw a new movie such as The Phantom Menace as a chance to, depending on their age, either re-experience the greatest thrill ride of their childhood as if the first time, again, or get a second chance to be there for the first time to experience the thrill ride that they'd discovered second hand on home video.

But with Avatar, it all seems to come down to assurances that the technology is awesome, a breakthrough look into a whole new world, and this seems to be striking a chord with people in a way that it didn't when the same hype was attached to, say, One from the Heart or TRON, or even, earlier this year, Monsters vs. Aliens, the "breakthrough" 3-D movie that, in terms of artistry or simple entertainment value, fell so far short of either Coraline or Up. On the one hand, I'm happy for anything that makes people feel that they really do have to make the slog out to the theater because they'll be missing out if they wait for the DVD. On the other hand, to see so much excitement over the money and technology that went into a movie seems like the final end result of the Entertainment Tonight/Entertainment Weekly era, when regular audience members became so knowledgeable about box office numbers and, to a depressing degree, came to care about them almost as much as the studio heads and producers do, as if a movie's position on the charts were a better gauge of its quality than what your own eyes and ears are telling you there in the dark. It's a reaction that I suspect I'll continue to find ominous even if I love the movie to death. Stay tuned.

A Tiffany Network Christmas

Stats!

Thanks to Andrew Gelman for an intriguing, Experience-related post. Come to think of it, I can't say that I've used that particular link in my own blogroll recently, and God knows it behooves me to straighten up around here every so often. Let the wild rumpus begin!

New in Nerve

Terry Gilliam Will Make You a Better Person



Also: Who Would You Rather? Robert Downey, Jr. or Jude Law?

The Oral Tradition

When Oral Roberts died last week, every obituary that i noticed referred to him as "a pioneering televangelist." This is accurate but a little unfair, since it makes him sound as if he could be neatly bracketed in the same category as Falwell and Jim and Tammy and the others who used the TV pulpit to cash in or reach for political power starting in the late 1970s and 1980s. Oral actually came from, and always kept one foot in, an older tent show tradition, and though he went into TV and used it as a money-raising tool with a vengeance, he was always a lot weirder, and, I suspect, considerably more sincere in his beliefs than people like the bullying demagogue Falwell or Jim and Tammy when they were on their crusade to make everything nice-nice. The missing link in the evolution of the TV preacher is Billy Graham, who, so far as I remember, never had a regular Sunday broadcast but barnstormed the country via the airwaves with his periodic TV specials. Reviewing one of them back in the early '70s, when Billy was joined at the hip to President Nixon, Nicholas von Hoffman wrote that the assembled crowd "looked like the Republican party at prayer." (Billy, too, always struck me as sincere, and he proved it, and at the same time revealed the confused priorities and awesome naivete that went with that sincerity, when the transcripts of the Nixon White House tapes were released and inspired Billy to express disillusionment over the news that the Quaker President had such a potty mouth.) Billy is still alive at 91, the advanced age at which Oral died. Falwell and Tammy Faye Bakker died much younger, a statistic that I am not inclined to interpret as meaning that the good lord was in more of a hurry to welcome him into his heavenly family.

Von Hoffman's words were prescient: it does seem as if the true religious faith of most of the modern televangelist faithful is that of the Republican party. Oral was a Pentecostal, a strange race that the people at my old Southern Baptist church used to appreciate because they gave us somebody else to point at as the real weirdos. (Billy Graham is Southern Baptist, but in his salad days he represented that faith before it became a fully owned subsidiary of the GOP.) As a Pentecostal, Oral spoke in tongues, praying every day with his wife in a mysterious, divinely inspired language that was half Captain Beefheart, half Teletubbies, usually delivered in the lyrical tones of someone who's just caught his dick in his zipper. Oral, who gave himself over to God after he had been divinely cured of what some back country sawbones had diagnosed as a terminal case of TB, was ten years into his preaching career when he found that he himself had the power to heal the sick and raise the dead with his right hand. Oral, who wrote autobiographies like Li'l Wayne drops mixtapes, was given to reminiscing about the many times that he resurrected dead people at his live shows. You might wonder what the dead people were doing there, but it seems that, perhaps because of his awesome charisma, adults and children had a startling tendency to breathe their last while he was onstage. Oral once explained that he hated to show off like that but that having someone drop dead in the middle of a show can be very distracting and that he found it necessary to resurrect them so that he could continue to deliver the Lord's word.

It was Oral the raving bull goose loony whose image was preserved for all time by Lenny Bruce in his epic "Religions, Inc." routine ("Thank you very much! Thank you, boy, here, have a snake!"). A milestone in Bruce's career and the history of stand-up comedy itself, it depicted Oral as a cynical religious con man with contempt for the "thick rednecks" who were his natural audience, which stands to reason, since Bruce's most fertile approach as a satirist was always to describe the powerful and respected as if they were just another bunch of nightclub performers who'd come up from working in strip clubs and toilets and hustled aluminum siding between gigs. It's most prescient when it caricatures the rage that the self-made man (and woman, Sarah) feels at the brainy types who would dare to patronize him for his lack of book learnin'. "Go ahead, laugh at him," Bruce's Oral says to the straw men he's sure must think the worst of him. "There's a dummy! Ha ha ha ha! I'm a dummmy. Yes, I'm dumb, I got two Lincoln Continentals, that's how goddamn dumb I am. I'm dumber'n hell, I don't know how much a whole lot of nines are!" The supreme skeptic Martin Gardner once wrote of Oral, "Insecure feelings about his early poverty and lack of education mix with an awesome ego. Oral will never consider that when he hears the voice of God he is listening to himself, that when he builds a bigger monument it is a monument to himself. His visions are too childish to be fabrications."

It was the monument building that would lead to the biggest splash of bad publicity that Oral had to suffer through in his dotage. In 1977, he was visited by a 900-foot Jesus who instructed him to build an enormous hospital amd medical research center in his home base of Tulsa, for the express purpose of finding the cure for cancer. The City of Faith Medical and Research Center proved to be a huge boondoggle, and early in 1987, hurting for money to keep it open, Oral informed his television audience that God had told him that if he didn't raise eight million dollars by March, He, God, would "call you home." Lenny Bruce, had he lived to see that moment, would have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. At the time I was working at a college theater in Louisiana, and one day I walked into the green room where everybody hung out and drew assignments to see that somebody had erected an Oral Roberts Countdown Calendar to help us keep track of the slow march towards the inevitable. In the end, the inevitable was called off by an owner of dog race tracks in Florida, who wrote Oral a check because, he told reporters, he was afraid that if the old boy didn't make his nut he might hurt himself. It turned out to be the first match struck in a string of televangelists self-immolating themselves that went on for over a year, including the scandal that wiped out the Bakkers, Falwell's embarrassing attempt to publicly lend them a hand, Jimmy Swaggart's on-air confession of having let lust get the better of him on Airline Highway, and the circus of Pat Robertson's run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Most secular-minded people my age probably remember that incident better than anything else about Oral, and coming as part of that whole tabloid supernova, it probably confirmed most of them in their assumption that one religious blowhard with an electronic collection place is pretty much the same as any other. I don't really want to defend Oral, and I'd hate to seem to be engaging in some kind of gonzo nostalgia and claiming that they don't make mercenary religious nuts the way they used to. But I do think the old boy deserves a little better than to be lumped in with the Falwells and the Bakkers and the Robertsons. Part of it has to do with the sincerity issue, and part of it is that I can't imagine him every having been anything but a self-promoting religious fruitcake, whereas the Bakkers, say, might have found a measure of modest happiness if they'd settled for working a children's puppet show on local TV somewhere and kept God out of it, while Falwell was either born too late or too early, and should really have been either a backroom political kingmaker of the old school or a right wing radio gas bag who could have provided Rush Limbaugh with a little early competition. (Oral's son Richard Roberts, a would-be Vegas crooner turned faith healer and chairman and chief executive officer of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, has never tried very hard to seem to be anything but a guy working in the family business.)

But I'll say this for Oral: even as he was obliged to keep his glossolalia and resurrections out of camera range as he courted respectability later in his career, he never tried to seem like anything but a towering weirdo. Falwell and the other preachers who meddled in politics as part of the emerging religious right wanted to re-shape the country and have themselves officially recognized as the models for American Normal. Roberts didn't want or try to be normal, and he didn't try to change the world in his image; that would have limited his own specialness, and maybe the thought of a whole country of people in bad suits running around speaking in tongues even freaked him out a little. Americans, Werner Herzog once said, are the most exotic people in the world, because they think they're normal. I have no idea how much actual good Oral Roberts accomplished during his stay on Earth--and faith healers, people who convince people who may be really sick that need to get right with God more than they need to see a doctor, invariably leave a lot of damage in their wake. But at least he could die with the knowledge that he was perhaps the last person in his profession who recognized the obvious truth that a man of God, rather than fitting in too cozily with the most well-heeled and respectable members of society, ought to be something of a lunatic. Babble us out of here, Oral!

bragh neigh klery gheryik bhaery ghery...

New in Nerve

The Biggest Disappointments of the '00s



The Happiest Surprises of the '00s

New in Nerve

"Class of '99", a "report card" feature about the directors who helped make 1999 the most exciting movie year of my adult life, and what they've done with themselves in the ten years since.

Part of what I wrote had to be chopped for space reasons, and in the name of egotism, the wide-ranging nature of the subject at hand, and the possibility of hurting Kevin Smith's feelings, I'm tacking it on here:



BRAD BIRD: Bird first attracted attention back in 1987, with Family Dog, a hilarious animated short that was shown on TV as an episode of the anthology series Amazing Stories. It says a lot about the animator's plight that it would be almost ten years, by which time Bird was a veteran of TV series such as The Simpsons, The Critic, and King of the Hill, before he was able to get a studio to let him begin working seriously on his first feature: The Iron Giant, which was based on a book by Ted Hughes. Bird's extraordinary graceful, beautiful crafted Cold War fable was a high point in an especially good year for animation, but the movie tanked commercially amid charges that Warner Bros. had botched its marketing campaign. Bird might have seriously despaired at his prospects of ever getting to direct another feature, but in a lucky piece of synchronicity, he was invited aboard Pixar to develop his idea for became The Incredibles. (In 1999, Pixar itself released Toy Story 2, which had been made for the direct-to-video market before the suits realized that it was too good not to open in theaters.) The Incredibles proved to be such a blockbuster success that Bird was pushed into the director's chair for Pixar's Ratatouille. He's currently working on his live-action debut, the historical disaster picture 1906.



KEVIN SMITH: Smith's early films had the full benefit of the freshness of his writing talent and the full drawback that, as a visual artist, he has the eye of the average bat. It seemed kind of appropriate that Clerks (1994) looked like unedited security camera footage, and the indie sex comedy Chasing Amy (1997) connected with its audience in a way that made them very forgiving of its washed-out look and static frames, but Smith tried very hard to push himself for the 1999 religious satire Dogma, not just working to get some visual energy into the movie but even hiring the likes of Alan Rickman to make his dialogue soar.

The results, while pretty much confirming that Smith and Martin Scorsese are never going to really seem to be in the same profession, might have been the zenith of Smith's indie-moviemaking-as-fanzine-production approach. For a while there, he seemed to care, if only about applying his wit to subject matter where he had something to say. But ever since then, Smith has frittered away what career he has left in a case of terminal drift. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Clerks II overestimated the world's enthusiasm for his in-jokes about himself, his friends, and his "View Askewniverse", just as the attempted game-changer Jersey Girl (2004) badly miscalculated in its assumption that anyone was interested in seeing him explore his warm and tender side. Smith also maintains a public presence as a stage monologuist, talk show guest, sometime character actor--basically, any job that mainly requires him to talk. But as a director, his last brilliant idea, in last year's Zach and Mira Make a Porno, seemed to be to cast the movie in such a way that people might go see it because they thought it was the new one from Judd Apatow.

DOUG LIMAN: Liman had a big critical and commercial success with his second feature, Swingers (2006), but unfortunately for him, the media made such a fuss over the fact that the movie had been written by one of its stars, Jon Favreau, and that he and his co-star, Vince Vaughan, actually hung out together, that a lot of people wound up under the impression that they'd made the film by themselves. (It was as if the media somehow knew that, in just a year, they'd be all agog over Matt 'n Ben after Good Will Hunting and wanted to practice.) Liman's 1999 Go, while not nearly as big a hit, did manage to be funny and energetic in a way that felt both fresh and moderately slick. It was a calling card picture that suggested that Liman might have the chops to make big commercial movies and also that he might be restless and talented enough to have things on his mind that he'd like to explore in smaller projects between big-money gigs. Liman wasted no time in making good on the first half of that supposition with The Bourne Identity (2002), which established the template for the franchise to come, with its star, Matt Damon, crediting Liman for saving his career. Liman went on to direct Brad 'n Angelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which showed that he could sometimes take the dumbest, noisiest project off the rack and make something passably entertaining out of it, and Jumper, which proved that, yeah, sometimes, but not always! He recently finished Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, which might give us a clue about whether Liman does have anything on his mind. Either way, just to be on the safe side, his next project is Jumper 2.

If there's a common thread running through all this, it may be that it's shocking to realize how few completed movies have been made by so many talented people in the course of ten years. I don't know that it would have been anything but a fool's errand to try to guess, back in 1999, where any of these people were headed, but I would have been surprised if I'd been told that most of them would average, at best, three films a decade.





It's always been hard for people who care about doing good work in movies to fulfill their visions. Another Class of '99 alumni, Kimberly Pierce, had a huge critical success and a moderate commercial hit with Boys Don't Cry, for which its star, Hilary Swank, won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Since then, she's directed one movie, Stop-Loss, about the practice of extending the terms of U.S. military service people and ordering them back to combat zones after their official contracts have expired. A look at how national issues impact the lives of young people in rural small-town America, it shared many of the qualities that audiences responded to in Boys Don't Cry, but it was released at the tail end of a movie season spent hammering away at the conclusion that movies about the Iraq War are always dogs, and it got buried. In the years between her two pictures, Pierce wasted her time on a whole slate of projects that, for one reason or other, got derailed on the way to the first day of shooting.



On the other hand, earlier generations of directors managed to keep working at something even as their dream projects caught fire on the side of the road. People like David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson see themselves as artists, and it's understandable that they don't want to waste their creative lives on hackwork, just as it's surely no accident that the most prolific members of the Class of '99 have tended to be those who've been most comfortable grinding out stuff that the studios are happy to fund. Anderson spent some of time between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood doing a service for his hero, the late Robert Altman, hanging around the set of Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion so that the insurance company would have the reassurance of knowing there was someone there who could jump in for the ailing, 80-year-old director. Altman was a notoriously ornery bastard who fought with the studios his whole career, but he also made four features between 2000 and his death six years later, seven features between 1990 and 1999, and 15 between 1970 and 1980. Between 1982 and 1989, a period traditionally thought of as his lost years, when no studio would look at him cross-eyed, Altman made six features released to theaters, five filmed plays made for television, and the HBO mini-series Tanner '88. He didn't really find his voice as a director until he was in his mid-40s, and as soon as he had a name he could trade on, he was raring to work.

I'm also not sure what to make of the fact that such current directors as Soderbergh and Richard Linklater, who are older than most of the Class of '99 by only some five to ten years, have been so much more prolific, with Soderbergh directing twelve features (while also becoming very active as a producer for other directors' projects) and Linklater directing nine (including the just-released Me and Orson Welles). Both these guys belong to a continuing tradition in American film of directors who've had trouble doing exactly what they want learning to do their best with what they can get off the ground. They had to learn to pick their battles. Do the Class of '99 represent a break from that? Maybe they're the first generation of American directors who haven't had it hard enough.