Nothing in my life has ever felt quite so sexy and articulate as the talk-heavy scenes in that jewel of a movie, but it’s still been a valuable touchstone. Personally, I’ve been thrilled to catch a glimpse of the new world that Brokeback Mountain promised flicker into being, with a little boom in queer cinema arising in recent years, maybe kicked off by Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011), a sad and intimate film that I regularly return to as a sort of text on gay discourse. But there have at least been some attempts to widen cinema’s gaze beyond that of straight white men. Hollywood is a big ship, and is slow to change course. Sure, Avatar existed, but for all the money it made, it has not endured in the cultural consciousness-or, at least, my consciousness-the way, say, the harrowing epidemiology of David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) has, or the grinding scramble of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010).Īs Obama ascended in America, so too did a vital discourse about social justice and the ways the film industry has systematically failed marginalized people. ![]() In that light, movies seemed to get more jittery, more concerned with the bleak mechanics of things than with broad sweep. (Indeed, there was the Fargo poster to greet me when I staggered back to my dorm room on September 11, in my second week of college.)Ī year or so later, the housing bubble burst with a terrible crack, and an already ailing national psyche suffered another serious wound. The Coens may have veered into less optimistic territory since Fargo, but Marge’s light has long been a beacon of pragmatism and decency, shining through national turbulence with a comforting plainness. There have been few better models of how to maneuver in a changing world than Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, whose sighs and perky humor in the face of boggling grimness never feel sick with cynicism. The Coen brothers, already darlings of the art-house circuit, had their first mainstream hit with Fargo (1996), setting them on the course to become among the most influential directors of their era. Where so much indie filmmaking before had been ragged, here were films that were elegant in their weirdness. What luck it was that, as my movie consciousness dawned, American independent film was basking in an unprecedented heyday. The films of 1995 and beyond awed, uplifted, wrecked, and inspired me throughout my turbulent teen years and the long blur of post-adolescence. A boy floating halfway between the water below and the sky above in Barry Jenkins’s seismic, best-picture-winning Moonlight (2016).Īnd yet, despite that mass-market availability, these movies have instilled themselves in deeply personal ways, specific to individual experience. A lens splashed with blood as it makes its way, foot by agonizing foot, up Omaha Beach in Steven Spielberg’s game-changing war movie Saving Private Ryan (1998). Julie Delpy doing a lazy dance to a rambling Nina Simone song as she tells Ethan Hawke he’s going to miss his plane in Richard Linklater’s lo-fi masterpiece Before Sunset (2004). When thinking of the last 25-ish years in American movies, so many indelible images crowd my mind. View the full Director’s Portfolio from the 2019 Hollywood issue here. ![]() ![]() Of course, Anderson was referencing older masters-Scorsese and De Palma among them-but for me, at 14, it all seemed excitingly fresh, a heralding of a new era of daring, confident auteurship designed for my hungry generation. He really reveled in the motion of motion pictures, and in so doing seemed to fling something open, baring a vast landscape of jangly possibility. Riding the T back home, gazing out at dreary Boston, I was still dazzled by, and almost afraid of, that film’s cool glide, the way Anderson so keenly understood the physics of the medium. My sister and I, not yet 17, bought tickets to Flubber and then sneaked into another theater drawn in by the promise of seeing our infamous hometown antihero, Mark Wahlberg, in a new kind of role, but probably not prepared for the riot of style and formal daring that awaited us. One of my most vivid memories of my early life as a filmgoer is of cutting school in ninth grade (sorry, Mum) on a snowy Friday to go see Paul Thomas Anderson’s early magnum opus (and still my favorite of his films), Boogie Nights, in 1997.
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