“He hardly seems dead, just as it is difficult to believe he was ever clinically alive.” –David Thomson

I don’t know about this Peter Lorre. Look at him there in The Maltese Falcon. A pretty man, supposedly drenched in some lilac cologne (though it wouldn’t surprise me if he sprinkled on perfume, either), gloved, and pointing a gun at Humphrey Bogart. A great scene that first meeting between the two icons. Bogie laughing, knocking the gun out of Lorre’s effeminate hand. But don’t you feel that little twinge? That feeling of “watch it, Spade, watch it.” Because if there’s one thing that Peter Lorre traded in, it was unpredictablility. That silly fellow with the curls and the white bow tie could kill you without a second thought.

The Miracle Worker (1962), directed by Arthur Penn.

I remember when my parents sat us down one night to watch The Miracle Worker. You’ve seen it, right? Helen Keller, champion of the handicapped, in her early years. Brought out of her darkness by the ‘miracle worker’, Annie Sullivan, herself almost totally blind. The fights, the old South of the Reconstruction, where father and son sit at a table and talk about the Civil War while Annie and Helen wrestle for control. You’ve seen it, and you say, “yeah, OK.”

Of all the actors and actresses in Hollywood’s firmament, Paul Newman is the only one beloved by everybody. I mean really, there’s people who dislike Gene Kelly’s wide smile, Bette Davis’ fabulous bitchiness, Robert Redford’s blond hair and sly smile (which hides his acting liability), DeNiro’s intensity (and Jack Nicholson’s, too), Marilyn Monroe’s sexy ditziness, and Bogart’s… oh, all right, everyone loves Bogart, too. So let me amend that: everyone loves Bogart and Newman. But we also really, really like Paul Newman.

Up (2009) directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. —Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Carl and Ellie Fredericksen have been married a very long time. At the opening of Pixar’s wonderful Up, we see the young Carl gazing in rapt attention at a newsreel of his favorite hero, Charles Muntz. Muntz, dressed like Charles Lindbergh but looking like Adolphe Menjou, is an explorer who jumps into his fabulous dirigible The Spirit of Adventure to search for the bones of the great and mysterious animals of the jungle, past and present. The explorer is in trouble: his latest discovery is called a fraud, he is disgraced, and vanishes into the misty Venezuelan jungle to prove his innocence. After the show, little Carl pretends to be the great Muntz, leaping over tree stumps and cracks in the sidewalk, when he also runs headlong into Ellie, a girl his age who is equally enamored of exploring, and the redoubtable Muntz. A friendship ensues. The friendship grows into love. The love quickens into marriage. The adventure begins.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), directed by Monte Hellman.

G.T.O.: Well, here we are on the road.
The Driver: Yup, that’s where we are all right.

I don’t even know where to begin. By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll probably say to yourself, he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about, and you’d be right, except that I’m writing, not talking, but then you knew that. I’m assuming you haven’t seen Two-Lane Blacktop, so if I’m a bit… obtuse, forgive me. If you have seen Two-Lane Blacktop, then you might just nod a bit, thin your eyes and wonder why you haven’t been on the road lately, really on the road, in a good long time. Come to think about it, you haven’t seen Blacktop in forever. But, man, you remember. And you’ll give that sly smile and say: I dig you, man. I don’t quite get it, either.

G.T.O.: I go fast enough.
The Mechanic: You can never go fast enough.

Damn right. You can never go fast enough. And yet, well, damn it to hell, Two-Lane Blacktop moves pretty slow. Slow and meandering, the way you drive cross-country and pick up hitchhikers. The way conversations with hitchhikers go, from here to there, non-linear. I’ll be God damned straight to Gary, Indiana that I’ve never seen a movie this slow that was so compelling, so exciting.

What’s the plot? Why do you ask? Haven’t you ever just driven someplace? Late at night, first thing in the morning, drove, drove, drove, and finally getting hungry you pass by McDonald’s and Hardee’s and all that empty corporate shit just to eat at some strange greasy spoon in the middle of a happy nowhere, a place you can’t ever call home but you can stop through for a bite, have a memory, and wonder if it really happened. There: that’s the fucking plot of Two-Lane Blacktop.

Back in 1971, Monte Hellman got together with writers Rudy Wurlitzer and Will Corry (don’t quite know what Floyd Mutrux did, but he helped somehow, or so it’s said) and threw this thing together. Got some money from Universal Pictures, brought in James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird, a cute model and odd duck, and the great Warren Oates. And then, holy shit, Rolling Stone called it a masterpiece while it was being filmed, and Esquire, having actually watched the thing, put Two-Lane Blacktop on the cover, published the entire screenplay, and declared it “The Movie of the Year.”

See, everyone thought it was going to be the next Easy Rider. Jesus, they were wrong. A bomb. Christ, what a bomb. Thank the good Lord it didn’t cost a ton, because no one saw it. Well, of course, some saw it. And, like me, I bet they felt as if they took one of the most memorable drives of their entire life.

G.T.O.: You can’t stay with the same high forever.

The facts? You just can’t get past that, can you? OK, James Taylor is The Driver, Dennis Wilson is The Mechanic, Laurie Bird is The Girl, and Warren Oates is G.T.O. The Driver and The Mechanic drive around the United States, on old Route 66, looking for races. That’s how they earn their bread, to sleep in dives, eat crap, and have money to fix that souped-up ’55 Chevy of theirs.

On the way, they meet G.T.O. and have a race for “pinks”–that is, the title of the car, and thus for the car itself. “Where to?” G.T.O. asks. “You pick,” The Mechanic says. G.T.O. says, “Washington, D.C.” The race is on.

Only it’s not. Shake yourself out of this fucking need for story, man. What’s that great moment in your life, a time when you did something weird and wild and spontaneous. Was there a plot? No, so just let it ride, man, let it ride. See, they drive. Are they racing? I guess. The Girl, see, she just climbed in the backseat of the primer-gray ’55 Chevy, and asked where The Driver was taking them. “East,” The Mechanic tells her. “I’ve never been East,” The Girl says, settling in. And when they run into G.T.O., well, things don’t really speed up. In fact, they stop, talk, tell lies, The Driver hops in G.T.O.’s machine, G.T.O. picks up hitchhikers, helps a lady to a funeral, and do just about everything but race.

And yet, they’re racing. You can feel it.

G.T.O.: If I’m not grounded soon, I’m gonna go into orbit.

My first impression of this movie was that it’s a masterpiece. I just loved it. Why? I don’t know. Beautiful–it’s certainly beautiful to look at, beautiful to experience. A rainy day in a small town all closed up as if on a Sunday morning, the old service stations with full service, Route 66 right on through the center of town. The sound of the engines, the sounds of the hood being removed, even the yak-yak of a pack of curious greasemonkeys coming over to ogle the engine of the Chevy. The road, twisting around a mountain, flat like a sunning snake through the corn belt, that sense that we know where we are but not really, not really. And all the music, nothing more than incidental, diagetic music bubbling through the radio or blaring off G.T.O.’s super 8-track cassette system. Country, Western, Hillbilly, Rock. The Doors, Kris Kristofferson, Arlo Guthrie.

Even better, there’s little or no politics to mar this foggy adventure. There’s cops, but they’re not bastards, just something to avoid, like a blown transmission. In only one scene does it seem like there’s menace, but it’s fleeting. There’s no hippie v. redneck subplots, no paean to getting stoned, no long ruminations about finding America, like Easy Rider and others in this vein.

No, Two-Lane Blacktop just takes a slice of time, a strange slice of time, and lets you see it without pretension. An exercise in nostalgia? If you want to call it that. But there’s a lot of great stuff here, and mostly, a lot of stuff that just plain works. I get the feeling that there’s a reason James Taylor, Dennis Wilson and Laurie Bird hardly worked again in movies, and no, I’m not talking about the heroin addiction of the first and the untimely deaths of the latter two. You can tell these guys don’t have much range–shit, any range, I’ll grant you that–but here, they’re perfect. Warren Oates is perfect, as usual, dressed in a different polyester v-neck sweater, a new color every day, sometimes an ascot, decked out in knuckle-less driving gloves, grabbing every hitchhiker to tell his ever-changing life story. Worked with rockets in Bakersfield, a TV producer here, lost his wife there. Who is The Girl? We never know, except to know that she’ll drop everything to jump in one car, then another, and finally (for us) a Harley, leaving everything behind. The Driver and The Mechanic? They’ll race, man. That’s what it’s about.

G.T.O.: Just color me gone, baby!

You know, if I was 17 in 1971, and saw Two-Lane Blacktop, Christ, I’d have hit the road. Looked for my own Girl, my own Mechanic, my own G.T.O. It’s as pointless and lovely as those long drives with or without music, lost in thought, picking up speed and slowing down. When you come back from those, it’s hard to tell what it was that made them so special. You get that look on your face, the kind that prompts your spouse to say “What are you thinking?” and you really don’t know. Just like Two-Lane Blacktop.

Here we are on the road. Yup, that’s where we are all right.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008), directed by Sacha Gervasi.

When they were all of fourteen years old, suburban Torontoites Steve Kudlow and Robb Reiner made themselves a pact: that they would boldly go where many young teens have gone before, namely, into the bizarre and often cruel universe that is rock and roll. They formed the heavy metal band Anvil, and began to rock hard, often times in parent’s basements or garages.

Goodbye Solo (2009), directed by Ramin Bahrani.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) directed by Oscar-winning hack Gavin Hood.

You might ask yourself: what in the hell could Ramin Bahrani’s modest Goodbye Solo have to do with the mighty, mighty extravaganza that is X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Aside from the fact that on this bright and sunny May Day, the start of when Hollywood shifts in its cave like a bear emerging from its winter slumber and unleashes its blockbusters, both Solo and Wolverine open here in Minneapolis. But aside from their debuts, it is apparent from watching both that they’re about superheroes, fighting and struggling to maintain order, and bring peace and harmony to the world.

Sugar and Tyson.

Sugar (2009) directed and written by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

To boil it down, Sugar is a baseball movie. Now I can already imagine art house patrons and filmgoers in general beginning to close their minds like gates in front of a Brooklyn Liquor store at the thought of yet another treacly film about the noble sport. So when I mention that Sugar is one vital part of the great American mythology, the essential tale of a Latin American immigrant struggling to make it here, well, then I find myself trying to shake into consciousness the hordes of baseball fans who want their movies as clean and crisp and sharply delineated as Rick Monday’s flag-saving sprint. Alas, Sugar, then, seems to hover in a netherworld between these two communities, who, if judging by box-office returns in Los Angeles and New York, are missing out on what is, simply put, a damn good movie.

The More The Merrier (1943) directed by George Stevens.

There was this moment in time when the world went crazy and everyone took up arms. Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, America… really, almost literally the whole world decided to try and kill one another and wreck the cities and the countryside. It was terrible. Good men and women here in the United States went off to fight this war or to do the jobs necessary to the effort. No one knew what would happen tomorrow. For all anyone knew, they or their loved ones might be dead in short order.

No Country For Old Men (2007) directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen.

No Country for Old Men opens with a series of shots of a dry, desolate Texas, a place that seems unkind to both man and beast. Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) begins to speak in voice-over, ruminating on his life, on his being a sheriff, admiring the men who served before him, and lamenting the way that crime has spun out of control these days.