It was a pretty tight race from beginning to end, but The Shawshank Redemption has emerged as the winner of the 1994 Movies Showdown!
Pulp Fiction actually took the early lead, but the contest was never a sure thing for either film; as the votes poured in, the match-up shifted only slightly from one side to the other and back again, and neither side ever developed a lead any larger than a few percentage points. Ultimately, though, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of the Stephen King story came out on top by a final result of 54% of the vote to Pulp Fiction’s 46% — still a commanding win, if not necessarily a landslide.
As always, thanks to everyone who participated and followed along, and stay tuned for our next showdown!
Round 1 Results | Round 2 Results | Round 3 Results | Round 4 Results | Round 5 Results
Round 1 Results | Round 2 Results | Round 3 Results | Round 4 Results | Round 5 Results
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(Photo by (c)Touchstone Pictures/ Courtesy: Everett Collection.)
Armageddon celebrates its 25th anniversary!
Thirty years on, the 1990s has solidified its stature as one of the magical decades in filmmaking, much like how we view the ’30s and the ’70s. Precisely, this Gen X-decade pulled together the Hollywood studio power of the ’30s and the groundbreaking creativity of the ’70s, crocheting commercialism and art into the movie behemoths we speak of in legend as the ’90s blockbuster — which we’ve now ranked all by Tomatometer!
First off, in putting together this list, we didn’t want no scrubs: We defined the ’90s blockbuster as any film that made over $100 million at the box office in the ’90s — movies that had people literally lining up around the block to spend their easy-earned cash. (The economy was booming after all.) This, of course, ushers in all those films synonymous with ’90s blockbusterism, including Jurassic Park, Speed, Twister, Independence Day, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Phantom Menace, Armageddon, Wild wild West, and Batmans with three different guys.
But the ’90s blockbuster was more than just fast buses, exploding White Houses, and bat nipples. Audiences opened up wallets and handbags (they’re European!) on brazen independent films (Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, The Blair Witch Project), big comedies (Sister Act, The Nutty Professor, The Waterboy, Dumb & Dumber, The Birdcage), and romances both funny and dramatic (Pretty Woman, Shakespeare in Love, Jerry Maguire, Ghost).
It was the era of the Disney renaissance (Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King), special-effects breakthroughs (Toy Story, Total Recall, The Matrix), and where the most popular movies of the year could reasonably expect a Best Picture statue come next February (Unforgiven, Titanic, Dances With Wolves). A scintillating ’90s blockbuster can transport us to that moment before cinematic universes, before CGI overload, and before ubiquitous cell phones and Internet; today, Lloyd Christmas can just DM Mary Samsonite and say “Hey, I have your briefcase :)” if he weren’t still illiterate.
Now, relive the rush of the decade without the searing sting of slap bracelets, or shotgunning Fruitopia, with our guide to every ’90s blockbuster ranked by Tomatometer!
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(Photo by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection)
After a number of character parts and bit roles in a swath of urban dramas at the start of his career, Jackson made his breakthrough statement as the fiery voice of reason in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing: DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy. Pulling off a character with a name like that should only lead to more success, and sure enough, then came the slapstick comedy (Loaded Weapon 1), a disarming role in Jurassic Park, and the ultimate ’90s character: hitman Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.
From there, Jackson has only cemented his rep as Hollywood’s versatile king of volatile cool, partnering with John McClane (Die Hard With a Vengeance), feelin’ the Force in the Star Wars prequels, starring as the sexy spawn of Shaft, and making his mark in original meme movie Snakes on a Plane.
And as, of course, the linchpin of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Nick Fury, whose movie appearances (brief or significant) are all included here in the greater interest of the general public, i.e. you’re going to complain if we didn’t. With that said, hold on to your butts for Samuel L. Jackson movies ranked by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo
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(Photo by 20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy Everett Collection)
Looper celebrates its 10th anniversary, as The Fifth Element turns 25!
Where there’s a Willis, there’s a way. A way to make it from TV sitcom star to eternal everyman action movie hero (Die Hard). A way to make a talking baby movie work (Look Who’s Talking) to the tune of $300 million at the box office in the ’80s. And a way to throw it all away with misfires like Bonfire of the Vanities and Hudson Hawk. And a way to get it all back again by kickstarting the ’90s indie boom with Pulp Fiction.
Since then, Bruce has continued to have a wild career, with the occasional crucial movie released at the exact right time to freshen up his image, whether in epic blockbusters (Armageddon), muted horror (The Sixth Sense), twee comedy (Moonrise Kingdom), or sci-fi cult classics (Looper). Recent highlights include Glass, the surprise finale to M. Night Shyamalan’s trilogy that started with Unbreakable and Glass, and Edward Norton passion project Motherless Brooklyn. And now we’re ranking all Bruce Willis movies by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo
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(Photo by Lionsgate/ courtesy Everett Collection)
From sneaking in the shadows undetected to all-out ballets of bullets and blood, the movies have long been drawn to the seductive cinematic flair of assassins and contract killers. It’s about getting down and dirty in an underworld of amorality, cruelty, and violence…yet upheld by its own sacrosanct code of ethics and principles. They probably gave John Wick a rulebook the size of a Chilton manual when he joined the club.
In our guide to the best assassin movies, we’ll witness its smoky origins in film noir, like This Gun for Hire or Murder by Contract, the latter of which Martin Scorsese cites as an early influence. The 1960s saw the assassin naturally go international with some stone-cold classics like Jean-Pierre Melville‘s Le Samourai and Seijun Suzuki‘s Branded to Kill. The paranoid cinema of the ’70s brought out the likes of The Day of the Jackal, while John Woo in the ’80s delivered the blistering The Killer, jumpstarting a Hong Kong tradition of action storytelling carried into today with the likes of director Johnnie To (Vengeance, Election).
Of course, ever since Quentin Tarantino wrought forth the modern hitman template Jules and Vince in Pulp Fiction, we’ve seen plenty more of banter-driven, pop culture-heavy films: Smokin’ Aces, The Boondock Saints, Lucky Number Slevin, and most recently Bullet Train. And, sure, you can make a killing doing the opposite: Keanu Reeves, Jean Reno, Angelina Jolie, and Matt Damon are earning their checks with less words per kill.
To rank the list, we listed Certified Fresh films first. Then we added Fresh movies, like the The Long Kiss Goodnight, Hanna, and the Jason Statham Cranks. After that, we included Rotten movies with positive Audience Scores. The Equalizer, Shooter, The Accountant, Colombiana: Critics weren’t necessarily in love with them but audiences were.
Read on for the best assassin movies ever ranked by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo
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If you want to watch something funny, mind-blowing or mind-bending to pair with the altered state you find yourself in, look no further than our 20 best movies to watch while high. Consider comedies that commit to their insane internal zaniness, like Step Brothers, Airplane!, and Monty Python. There are movies that dazzle with their visuals (The Fall, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Spirited Away), with others also kicking the audio component into overdrive (Pink Floyd – The Wall, Tron Legacy).
Let science-fiction become the theater of the mind, as Inception, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Matrix knock your perspectives around. And some movies — like Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Shaun of the Dead — will lock you to your couch based on pure elan and style. After that, we sorted the movies by Tomatometer, from lowest to highest.
Get ready for some unforgettable experiences with the 20 best movies to watch while high! (And don’t forget to check out the 25 essential stoner movies.) —Alex Vo
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(Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
Josh Gad is fast becoming Disney’s go-to man when the Mouse House finds itself in need of a hilarious sidekick. He’s played everyone’s favorite sun-loving snowman, Olaf, in the Frozen films, and stole the live-action Beauty and the Beast as Gaston’s bumbling buddy, LeFou. Now, he’s back to steal more scenes as kleptomaniac, over-gown dwarf Mulch Duggins in Disney’s adaptation of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, an action-packed fantasy about a child criminal mastermind, a world of fairies, and the bond between a father and his son.
The movie was supposed to hit theaters this year but is going straight to streaming service Disney+ following disruptions to the release schedule on the back of COVID-19, something Gad has mixed feelings about: on the one hand, this spectacle-filled family flick will bring some joy to people at a time when they need it, but on the other hand, “nothing will ever replace the cinema,” he told Rotten Tomatoes.
Ahead of the movie’s digital release, Gad shared his five favorite films, with a big caveat. “I want to preface this by saying I have my five favorite movies to watch of all time, which are Back to the Future, The Goonies, Groundhog Day, The Wizard of Oz, and probably Ratatouille,” he said. “Those are the five movies that I watch over and over again.” He says the movies below are the ones that opened his mind about film: “These are the movies that I think really gave me a perspective on what cinema can be.”
Number five, I would say is There Will Be Blood. I was in a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] screening. The movie had gotten no attention at that point. I saw it before it had come out. I was a massive fan of [writer-director] P.T. Anderson. Obviously, anybody who goes to conservatory – like, Daniel Day-Lewis is core curriculum. I sat there and I watched as this movie began with 20 minutes of silence, basically. And I have never, in the modern era, I have never felt so mesmerized watching a contemporary film in my life. It was so unbelievably daring and brave and phenomenal, and the performances were so bizarre that I couldn’t understand what I was watching. So I would say that would be number five for me.
Number four would be – it’s almost cliché to say this now – but Pulp Fiction. So 1994 was an insane year for cinema. As a kid, I probably saw Lion King six times in the theater that year; as a son, I probably saw Forrest Gump five times in the theater, because my parents kept taking me to it. But as a person coming into my own and realizing what moviemaking could be, that movie was a movie I snuck into and it was called Pulp Fiction. I had never seen anything like it before. It just completely blew my mind wide open with the possibilities of storytelling and introduced me to a filmmaker that wasn’t yet on my radar because, frankly, my parents never allowed me to watch Reservoir Dogs at that time. I remember walking through the looking glass and just having this jaw-dropping experience.
You mentioned you snuck in to see Pulp Fiction. Was that because you were underage? And how did you get in?
Oh yeah, I was under age, and I was with a couple of friends of mine and we were at the AMC theater in Hollywood, Florida, where I grew up, and we bought tickets to another movie and we snuck in. We were bad; we did that a couple of times. I actually got kicked out of Demolition Man for doing that, but Pulp Fiction, somehow I didn’t get kicked out. And I think I did it twice, because I was just so like, “What the hell did I just see? This is incredible.” So that definitely rocked my world.
Number three is a movie that I think is a perfect film and it’s a film that it doesn’t matter whether I saw it for the first time at 2, or revisited again at 10, or 22, or 32, or this past year when I took my kids to see it on the big screen. And that’s The Wizard of Oz.
The word “timeless” is thrown around a lot, and very rarely does it actually feel like it applies to as many motion pictures as are branded with that title. But The Wizard of Oz is one of those films that it truly doesn’t matter when you see it, it’s still timeless. It remains timeless. And that experience is proven by the fact that my own children, seeing it in a movie theater after seeing it on the small screen when they were very young, are still as awestruck by every single moment of that film as they were the first time they saw it. And it’s a movie that was made during the Great Depression. So that is a testament to great cinema. That’s a testament to the power of film.
Have you done The Wizard of Oz on stage yourself?
I’ve never done The Wizard of Oz on stage. Man, wouldn’t that be great? No, never had that opportunity.
We’ll just put that out there into the universe for now.
We’ll put that out there. We’ll will that into the universe. I don’t know that I’m going to be doing any stage anytime soon, but one day.
The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II
So, then you get into the top two, which is just so damn hard to pick two movies that you can share to be the most perfect films of all time, but I’m going to do my best. I was 12 years old. and I had only been told in passing about this “saga,” these films that had been described as perfect. Then I went to Blockbuster Video and took a deep breath and grabbed a large case of two VHS tapes called The Godfather. And I took it home and I watched it and I was so unbelievably mesmerized that I made my mother drive me to the Blockbuster the next morning and I got Godfather II. And I put that in and watched it and then went and got Godfather III, which I wish I hadn’t gotten because I would have loved to have just kept it at those two films.
But it was this moment of, again, an awakening where you realize the power of cinema – you realize what true moviemaking is. I’m going to cheat and say that Godfather 1 and II are in my number two spot together because they are just so absolutely perfect and brilliant and almost act as one piece. And the level of filmmaking, the level of acting, the level of craftsmanship is just on another level that I don’t know will ever be surpassed. It really is just something to behold.
Up until recently, I would have told you that Godfather I and Godfather II would probably be number one for me. And I have to go back and revisit them because frankly, it’s been about five years since I’ve done so. But I had an experience right before COVID that was pretty remarkable.
It was a movie that I’d seen plenty of times, in all the wrong ways. And frankly, it wasn’t even in my top 10. I found it a little boring, I found it a little hard to muster through, and I found it difficult at best. And then I went to the ArcLight Cinerama Dome, and I sat down, and for the next four hours I watched Lawrence of Arabia with an audience, the way that it was meant to be seen. And I’ve got to tell you in this moment right now, that movie is the movie that I would probably put number one on my list of most influential films for me as an artist.
It’s haunting. It’s absolutely crazy to think that it came out when it came out, and that it takes the kind of risks it takes with its lead character. It was so unbelievably complicated and not easily digestible in terms of some of the choices that are made. And the complexities of his character are stripped away in real time, against the backdrop of some of the most incredible cinematography to ever be captured on a lens. It just really slayed me.
Joel Meares for Rotten Tomatoes: You mentioned seeing Lawrence on the big screen… What are your feelings about the fact that Artemis Fowl, because of what’s happening, isn’t going to premiere on the big screen, but is going direct to Disney+?
Josh Gad: My feeling is that it is rising to the moment and I couldn’t be more grateful. I would so much rather the audience get to experience this movie than sit at home and wish that they could have the opportunity to see something right now. I think, frankly, the fact that we get to share it with people at a time that is so difficult to find any joy, to find any light, to find any hope… There are millions and millions of families that are stuck between four walls right now, trying to not lose their minds, and if we can give them a two-hour respite from that, a break, then I absolutely support this decision to give a movie like this to families who so desperately need it.
Does it hurt that I can’t celebrate this film with others on the big screen? Absolutely. Nothing will ever replace the cinema – nothing. Movie theaters have been a part of our collective experience for so long, and it binds us together. And it’s why even in this most desperate time, people are still making a trek to drive-in theaters, because they want that communal experience. So yes, it is, to some extent, a mixed bag, but I’m eternally grateful that we have an opportunity to share what I think people need most.
Artemis Fowl is available to stream on Disney+ on June, 12 2020.
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Thumbnail image: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney, ©Paramount Vantage/courtesy Everett Collection
(Photo by Getty Images - Rachel Luna)
Every now and then social media does do good things. A couple of years ago after Brooklyn Nine-Nine was canceled by Fox, the internet and some high-profile names refused to accept it. Celebrity fans Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mark Hamill, and Guillermo Del Toro decided to band together to kick off a tweetstorm of support for the show. That spark ignited the “Nine-Niners” (the internet name for fans of the show) to plead with another platform to save the beloved series from cancellation. And it worked. Brooklyn Nine-Nine trended on social media for several days and was eventually picked up by NBC.
Two seasons later, the show is still going strong and set to shoot its eighth season (the third on NBC) as soon as TV production is allowed to continue. This die-hard support is why Terry Crews (who plays Sgt. Terry Jeffords) and the entire cast feel such a special affinity for the fandom. No one is quite sure when production will be approved to continue, but until then, fans can hear the NFL star-turned-actor in the animated adaption of Lois Lowry’s children’s novel The Willoughbys.
The children’s dark comedy, which is currently Certifed Fresh at 89% on the Tomatometer, follows an eccentric family whose children think they’d be better off raising themselves and devise a plan to send their parents on “vacation.” They then embark on a harrowing and humorous adventure while left alone and eventually discover what “family” truly means. The cast includes Will Forte, Alessia Cara, and Sean Cullen, who voice the kids, while Maya Rudolph plays the kids’ nanny and Ricky Gervais hilariously narrates the film as the voice of the family cat. The selfish parents are voiced by Martin Short and Jane Krakowski, and Crews plays Commander Melanoff, the affable owner of a candy factory.
Read below to see our chat with Crews about The Willoughbys, in which he breaks down his love for animation, explains when we can expect more Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and gives us his Five Favorite Films — including one with an Oscar snub he’s still not over and one from his own filmography that holds special meaning.
Number one is Do the Right Thing. Do the Right Thing changed my life in so many ways. Spike Lee and the cast of that movie. Actually, when it came out back in 1989, I saw it in the theater probably 25, 30 times. This was way before we could just download anything. I’m in that era. I’m in the analog era. Pre-cell phone. You know what’s strange? At the time, Do the Right Thing, once it hit the video stores, was listed as a comedy. [laughs] That blows my mind. It was nowhere near a comedy, but that’s exactly where they felt black films that dealt with any subject matter needed to be. Right now you would never think of Do the Right Thing as being a comedy — it dealt with police violence, it dealt with xenophobia, it dealt with all kinds of stuff. It’s very encouraging on many levels.
Star Wars was my number one before Do the Right Thing came out, but it basically changed everything. It created the tent pole. I saw it in 1977 at a drive-in with my aunt. It was one of the first movies I was able to see because my mother was super religious. It changed the game for me. It let me know I was going to be in entertainment. I didn’t care what it would be. I didn’t care how I was going to do it, but once I saw Star Wars I was hooked. That just changed everything in many, many ways. The science-fiction part. The artistry. Everything about it was incredible, and to this day when I hear that John Williams score, it’s like, “Ahh.” I hear those horns, it fuels me and makes me remember why I’m in this business.
Next is Aliens. Alien was incredible but Aliens just took me out. James Cameron’s Aliens is crazy. The [Xenomorph] is still the most perfect movie monster ever created. You’ll never get better than the alien in Aliens. James Cameron actually one-upped the first movie with the Marines, the twists and turns, and Sigourney Weaver being this femme fatale who destroyed everyone. That’s the other thing. It had a feminist view. It had just so many viewpoints that were actually introduced in the movie that had never been there before. Everything else was all male-oriented and superstar, the guy who could never get beat and all that stuff. This movie turned that on its ear. Loved it.
Next is Training Day.
That was your first “real” role in a film right?
Yeah, Oh my God! I was an extra in Training Day. I didn’t have a chance to read the script, didn’t know what it was about. I just said, “I’ve got to be on this set.” I didn’t even get paid for that movie. I remember I showed up every day. A friend of mine was working on it, and he was like, “Hey man, Denzel’s shooting down in the jungle. You want to come?” And I was like, “I’m there.” And the director, Antoine Fuqua, put me in the movie as I was standing there. He said, “Hey man, you want to be in this movie?” I was like, “Yep.” He said, “Take your shirt off, go to the roof, and we’re going to be flipping pigeons.” I was like, “Let’s go!”
I came back every night, but when I saw the film it was on a psychological level. It just let you know the nature of what evil really is, and it plays on your good intentions. I thought of how many times in my life… I [got] tricked into things. You start out with great intentions, you try to do good things, and then you kind of open up and you realize, “Oh man, it’s not what I thought it was.” I had that moment 50 million times in my life, and when I look at Jake versus Alonzo, I say, “This started out good. He had great intentions, and he didn’t know what he was getting into.” I look at my whole career in the NFL like that.
Finally, Pulp Fiction. I still believe Sam Jackson should have gotten an Oscar for that film to this day. It was one of the most brilliant performances I have ever seen. It informed everything. It was funny, it was scary, it was sad, it was beautiful. My God, it was just a tour de force in filmmaking. Anytime it’s on, I cannot stop watching. What a beautiful, beautiful piece of artwork. It had all my favorite genres. It had blaxploitation, it had mystery, it had gangster.
Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: You have done a lot of voice work. What made you want to get involved with this one?
Terry Crews: You got to understand I’m an artist. I was going to be an animator when I first moved to LA. I had my portfolio in at Disney, at Dreamworks, Hanna-Barbera, the whole thing. My whole mood was to get behind the scenes, and acting was a mistake. That was an accident. I love animation. Animation is the holy grail for me. Ralph Bakshi has been one of my favorite guys. I remember American Pop back in the day. That early, early animation was just groundbreaking to me. The fact that you could draw these characters and do this thing, and then Pixar took it to another level.
So when I look at any opportunity to be in animation I never, ever turn it down. Kris Pearn, who was one of the directors of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, I got a chance to work with him there and just had a ball. When he was putting this together, because he’s one of the writers and the director of The Willoughbys. Another thing I loved about The Willoughbys is that it had a darker tone, much more heavy than you would normally see in animation, which kind of mirrors me. It’s funny because I’m very big, and I love comedy, but to me, I’m a very dark personality. The darker you are, the funnier you can be.
I thought this is a worldwide turn for animation, whereas in the typical Western animation, it’s like, “Yeah, we’re happy, and here’s another joke. Here’s another joke.” People kind of got formulaic about it, but with this, it’s Ricky Gervais’ tone where it’s just like, “Whoa!” I think it’s just so fresh, and so perfect. Martin Short, Will Forte, they’re all friends of mine. Maya Rudolph from my Idiocracy days. Jane Krakowski. I’m just honored to be amongst such great talent, because I’m a fan first. I’ve never considered myself this actor dude. I’m just a fan, and I enjoy great animation.
RT: Any Brooklyn Nine-Nine updates to give us during the quarantine?
Crews: Oh my God! First of all, we are more popular than ever. The Brooklyn Nine-Nine Instagram just hit two million today, which is strange for a show like that. To have people actually want to see you and be interested in your show when there’s so much out there, this is the payday of entertainment. You will never get more, and it’ll never be easier to just kind of flip from one to the next. But people are watching 100 episodes in a row. Whole families are now Brooklyn Nine-Niners.
I can’t wait ’til we come back. To see that this has really become a worldwide phenomenon is not lost on me, and I can’t wait to give people more. I’ll be honest with you; this season 7, it’s too short. We did 13 episodes, and I’m going, “Damn it! We could’ve done more.” I really do. We did 18 last year. We only did 13, but we did get picked up for season 8. When this pandemic settles, I can’t wait to see my Nine-Nine family. We’ve been all communicating with each other, and we can’t wait to get back and give the fans more.
RT: What’s next for you?
Crews: I did Rumble, which is coming out. It was supposed to come out in January of 2021. The trailer was on Sonic the Hedgehog film. That’s an animated character I played called Tentacularis. What’s so weird is that we don’t know if the movie is actually going to be in the theaters by that time. It may have to go straight to VOD just like all the other movies are right now. It’s kind of weird. It’s a very uncertain time. Everybody’s like, “Will the next James Bond actually be in theaters?” We don’t know.
RT: What do you think will happen on the other side of this?
Crews: I truly believe this is the deal. A lot of people are saying, “Oh my God, everything is going to change.” But you cannot do away with human interaction. You just can’t. And first of all, the world has seen pandemics before, and eventually, everything went back. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, is the real question, but the fact that it will go back is inevitable. Comedy shows to concerts to film, there’s no way we can all do this forever.
The Willoughbys is streaming now on Netflix.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a wonder for many reasons, not least of which is the way it wove together an intricate continuity across all of its movies. Throughout 23 films (and counting), there are crossover characters, intersecting storylines, and resonant names, locations, and even brands. Of course, when you step back, you realize that the MCU was only doing what comic books have been doing in print for decades. Take another step back, and you’ll notice that what they’ve done isn’t all that unique to movies, either. Because Quentin Tarantino, for one, has been doing it for decades, too.
From his earliest days as a struggling screenwriter to his iconic and era-defining films, Tarantino has built his own world of interconnected characters and original brands. In honor of the 25th anniversary of his legendary opus Pulp Fiction (released October 14, 1994), let’s take a look at the QTCU — the Quentin Tarantino Cinematic Universe.
A short film co-written, directed, and starring Tarantino while he was famously working at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California (it’s no longer there, so don’t plan a visit), My Best Friend’s Birthday only exists in a truncated 36-minute cut because large parts of it were destroyed in a fire. Still, the seeds of the QTCU are there. For one, Quentin plays a character named Clarence who, early on, discusses his love of Rockabilly music and Elvis’ acting ability. This would, of course, foreshadow Christian Slater’s character in True Romance, a script written by Tarantino but directed by the late Tony Scott. In Birthday, Tarantino’s Clarence hires a call girl to show his friend a good time on his special day — a sequence of events that would be flipped in True Romance, when Slater’s Clarence finds himself on the receiving end of a birthday call girl surprise.
Tarantino’s signature work, the movie that launched him as a filmmaker. In this tale of a jewel heist gone wrong, the audience is treated to flashbacks that fill in the stories of each of the movie’s black clad, code-named criminals. We find out that Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) used to run with a partner named Alabama. Of course, a woman named Alabama Whitman (later, Worley) is seen getting a taste for a life of crime in True Romance, the Tony Scott film that Tarantino wrote (see below). We also learn that Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) is named Vic Vega, as in the brother of John Travolta’s Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction.
(Photo by Warner Bros. courtesy Everett Collection)
Apart from the obvious connections to earlier films — the Rockabilly-loving Clarence and call girl-turned-crook Alabama — there is a more subtle cinematic link in Tony Scott’s Tarantino-penned action adventure. The movie climaxes with a drug deal in the hotel suite of big time movie producer Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek, channeling real life producer Joel Silver). Donowitz is a producer of war movies — fitting because his father, Donny Donowitz, fought in WWII as part of the Inglourious Basterds. You might remember him as the baseball bat-wielding avenger known as “The Bear Jew” (played by Eli Roth).
(Photo by Miramax Films)
Pulp Fiction, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, is arguably the Iron Man of the QTCU, because it’s really the one that takes the threads and begins to weave them together. The film introduces us to several brand names that would become central players in Tarantino’s world, starting with “that Hawaiian burger joint” Big Kahuna Burger — Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules takes the world’s most intimidating bite of one of these burgers and washes it down with “a tasty beverage” from the place early in the movie. Later, Bruce Willis’ Butch Coolidge orders a pack of Red Apple cigarettes, a brand that shows up in just about every subsequent QT movie. Finally, Christopher Walken’s Captain Koons — he of the legendary “gold watch” speech — is also a descendant of “Crazy” Craig Koons, one of Django’s bounties in Django Unchained.
(Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures)
Although Natural Born Killers was directed by Oliver Stone, the script was pure Tarantino. We mentioned earlier the brother connection between Vic and Vincent Vega, but there is another set of brothers that was first introduced in Reservoir Dogs, too. In Dogs, Vic complains about a pain-in-the-ass parole officer named Seymour Scagnetti (we never actually see him), whose own brother, Jack, would show up in Natural Born Killers (played by Tom Sizemore).
In the Tarantino-written and -directed segment of this anthology film, the characters are seen smoking Red Apple cigarettes. Tarantino’s character also refers to his drink as a “tasty beverage,” which echoes the same colorful turn of phrase Jules used in Pulp Fiction.
Tarantino wrote the script for this Robert Rodriguez-directed horror film and peppered in some of his signature touches. There are Red Apple cigarettes present and accounted for, and George Clooney’s Seth Gecko at one point makes a run for Big Kahuna Burgers. The movie also introduces gravelly-voiced, no-nonsense Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (played by Michael Parks), who would become a key player in the QTCU. It’s also worth noting that the movie features yet another pair of brothers (Seth and his brother, Richie, played by Tarantino) who have a thing for black suits.
(Photo by Miramax Films)
Beware of people who claim that, because it was based on an Elmore Leonard novel and not an original Tarantino idea, there are no overt connections to the QTCU in Jackie Brown. They’re just not paying attention. Midway through the film, we see Jackie in the Del Amo Mall food court, enjoying a meal from Teriyaki Donut — the same fictional fast food franchise whose food Ving Rhames’ Marcellus Wallace is carrying when Butch Coolidge runs him down in Pulp Fiction. In a second food court scene not long after, we not only see Jackie indulging in Teriyaki Donut again, but her accomplice Sheronda (LisaGay Hamilton) sits down at her table with a tray full of food from Acuña Boys, which would later be referenced in Kill Bill Vol. 2 and appear a couple of times in Grindhouse.
(Photo by Miramax Films)
We’ll treat this kung fu-inspired magnum opus as one film, with plenty of easter eggs to link it to the larger QTCU. For one, if you look at The Bride’s (Uma Thurman) old gang, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, you’ll notice that they all fit a little too easily into Mia Wallace’s description of her failed TV pilot, Fox Force Five – the blonde leader, the Japanese kung fu master, the black demolition expert, the French seductress, and Mia’s. character, the deadliest woman in the world with a knife (or sword?). The first cop on the scene after the Bride’s wedding day massacre is, of course, Earl McGraw, and Red Apple and Big Kahuna also make appearances. And remember Acuña Boys from Jackie Brown? In Vol. 2, they happen to be the name of the gang that Michael Parks’ Esteban Vihaio runs.
(Photo by The Weinstein Co./Dimension)
In both the Tarantino portion of this double feature homage, Death Proof, and the Rodriguez portion, Planet Terror, there are connections to the QTCU. Big Kahuna burgers are mentioned, and Red Apple cigarettes are smoked. On top of that, an ad for Acuña Boys “Authentic Tex-Mex Food” — first glimpsed in Jackie Brown — pops up during intermission, and one of Stuntman Mike’s early victims, Vanessa Ferlito’s Arlene, can be seen sipping from an Acuña Boys cup. Texas lawman Earl McGraw also reappears, along with his son, Ed, and we learn there is a sister named Dakota, too, who features in Planet Terror. As kind of a bonus, Rosario Dawson’s Abernathy has a familiar ringtone on her phone — it’s the same melody whistled by Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah) in Kill Bill Vol. 1.
(Photo by Francois Duhamel/©Weinstein Company)
In addition to Donny Donowitz, Michael Fassbender’s English soldier-turned-spy Archie Hicox has deep ties to the QTCU, it turns out. Late in the old west-set Hateful Eight, it is revealed that Tim Roth’s Oswaldo Mobray is actually a wanted man named “English Pete” Hicox, Archie’s great-great-grandfather.
(Photo by The Weinstein Co.)
We’ve already mentioned “Crazy” Craig Koons, but there is another deep cut reference to Django hidden in an earlier Tarantino movie. In Kill Bill Vol. 2, Bill’s brother Budd (played by Michael Madsen – also another pair of QT brothers!) buries the Bride alive in the grave of Paula Schultz. This is the lonely final resting place for the wife of bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in Django.
(Photo by The Weinstein Company)
In addition to the Hicox family tree, Red Apple tobacco — the early version of the soon-to-be ubiquitous (in the QTCU, anyway) cigarette brand — makes a couple of appearances here. Demián Bichir’s Bob smokes a “Manzana Roja” right after the intermission, and Channing Tatum gets a custom-rolled Red Apple cigarette — his “favorite” — from Dana Gourrier’s Miss Minnie.
(Photo by Columbia Pictures)
At one point in Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Bride drives a blue Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. That same car shows up (driven by Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth) in Hollywood. And not only do Booth and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton smoke Red Apples (of course), but there’s an end-credits scene in the movie that shows Dalton doing a TV commercial for the cigarette brand.
Pulp Fiction was released in theaters on October 14, 1994.
92%
(Photo by Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
When Melanie Laurent joined Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in 2009, she was already a celebrated actress in her native France, where she began her big screen career more than a decade prior. She earned widespread acclaim for her role in that film as vengeful cinema owner Shosanna Dreyfus, and she later went on to star in other Hollywood projects like Beginners and Now You See Me, even as she continued to work in France.
In 2011, Laurent proved acting wasn’t her only talent when she decided to jump behind the camera to co-write and direct her first feature, The Adopted, which she then followed with 2014’s Breathe. Last week, she made her English language directorial debut with Galveston, a crime drama starring Ben Foster as a betrayed hitman and Elle Fanning as the young woman he inadvertently rescues. Laurent took some time out of her busy schedule to speak with RT about her Five Favorite Films, expressing her admiration for Tarantino and P.T. Anderson and explaining why films like theirs are so rare.
I would say Peau d’âne, by Jacques Demy, a French musical with Catherine Deneuve, because I fell in love with Catherine Deneuve. I was so impressed. I think that, because I watched her being a princess in that movie, that I wanted to be an actress. She was so amazing, and I love Jacques Demy movies. It’s like a real beautiful fairy tale and, I just watch that movie again and again.
I would say, Vacances romaines. I don’t know the English title. With Audrey Hepburn. Roman Holiday? I was not at all a baby girl who just wanted to be a princess, at all, but the fact is, in my movie choices, I was really obsessed with those beautiful and strong and funny and fragile women. [laughs] I was not wearing any princess dress or things like this, but in movies, I was very into it.
I would say Pulp Fiction, for sure. When you are a teenager, I would say, “What the hell is going on? If making movies looks like this, OK, I want to be a director.” Everything was kind of perfect; there was the humor. That’s why I was not just honored and happy to work with [Quentin Tarantino], but crazy happy. [laughs] When he told me he was doing the movie, I was dancing in the streets in Paris for hours. I had a sense of joy, for sure. So I would say Pulp Fiction, for everything we just love in that movie, like the dialogue, the shots, the lights, the actors, the craziness, the freedom of making something so freeing.
Then, Boogie Nights by P.T. Anderson. I loved it, kind of like for the same reason, and also because I’m very impressed by the fact you can make an artsy movie, but also a commercial one, and a popular one. It’s so rare. It’s just the most difficult thing to do, and they both did that. It’s a big inspiration for me because art films and small, independent movies are so hard to exist right now, and I think it’s very hard as a director today to feel like, can I do something free? Can I do something beautiful? Can I do something also funny but also act strong, say something about the world, but also not doing something too popular, and with some cliché subject. I feel like it’s very tricky right now to give money for a director who’s gonna have different ideas and want to do something special. So, I would say those movies, because also we need to talk about that problem right now of making small movies that don’t really exist any more, and are suffocated by those big other ones. It’s kind of scary right now.
To pick one last one, I would say… That’s hard, because I have many in my mind right now. I loved Melancholia, but I also loved Room. They’re very different. I would say those two movies, but for many different reasons. So if I have to keep one, well, let’s keep Melancholia. That was a shock because visually it was so interesting, but also I will always remember that first shot, my entire life. That big limousine was stuck and then it’s like, two persons, and you know it’s never going to work and that was that. Amazing cleverness in that shot. And also, talking about the fears and talking about depression and talking about how do you deal with that big world which is too big for you. But also a movie that’s very free. I’m just realizing I’m keeping movies that are very free. Don’t ask me my five favorite songs, please. [laughs]
Ryan Fujitani for Rotten Tomatoes: I’ve enjoyed your work as an actress, and I’ve enjoyed your work as a writer and director as well. I’m wondering which of those you enjoy the most, and which of those would you prefer to have the longest, most fruitful career in.
Melanie Laurent: Well, now I have the perfect balance, because writing a script takes a long time, and I can write scripts while I’m shooting as an actress because actors wait for hours on set. And this is my favorite thing, ideas coming up on set, and [having a place where I can] escape from a set. I just like to be in my mind. And, being a director is my passion, for sure, but when I’m not working as an actress, I’m missing it, and I’m not really happy.
Also, for specific reasons, any time I’m an actress I’m just learning from a director, so much. And observing amazing directors obviously is the best cinema school, so I’m always so happy to do it. I’m not playing the fact, “I’m a director, I know exactly what you’re going through.” I’m just an actress, except that I know how they feel, and I’m just maybe more empathetic to them when it’s complicated because I know what’s going on here. So, I would say if I can keep those two things always, that would be a dream.
Galveston opened in limited release on Friday, October 19.
(Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
The artist formally known, and credited, as “MILF guy,” has come a long way since his American Pie days. The last decade has seen John Cho shed his goofy teen comedy stylings – has it really been seven years since Harold and Kumar were on our big screens? – to forge two striking career paths: One as a key part of a mega mainstream franchise in the Star Trek movies, the other as a lead in some of the most interesting breakout indie films of recent years. If you haven’t seen him in 2017’s moving and visually singular Columbus, you really should.
This month he runs straight through the middle of those two paths with Searching, a missing-child thriller full of mainstream pleasures – big twists, edge-of-your-seat suspense – told with indie innovation: The movie takes place entirely on screens, with FaceTime conversations, YouTube clips, Venmo accounts, and Google search bars somehow coming miraculously together to propel the story forward. None of it would work without a performance like Cho’s, who plays the father of the missing girl with a mix of determination and woundedness that never lets you forget the human story at the center of the technical wizardry.
Ahead of Searching’s release, Cho spoke with Rotten Tomatoes about his Five Favorite Films, which themselves mix very real emotion with innovative storytelling. He stressed that there were “25 I could have picked from,” but settled – at least on the day we spoke – for the five films below.
I hadn’t seen Sideways in a number of years, and recently saw it again, and sat down with it and was overwhelmed at how much more meaningful it had become in the years since I had seen it. I don’t know why – I guess it’s just really cheesy: Like wine, it had aged for me. (I’d take that out, that was so cheesy!). But it had matured for me as a story, or perhaps I had grownup to meet the story – it was so lyrical and so authentic in every moment. Stories about failure, to me, are more meaningful as I get older.
That movie also swings big, and that’s another thing that I like about it. That monologue, Virginia Madsen’s monologue… it’s just achingly romantic. [And] the end, where he drives up, sort of mirroring The Graduate, but it’s Dustin Hoffman, the loser version, which is way closer to me than the heroic version in The Graduate. [The movie] just keeps curving into itself, and out of itself, and it’s just an incredibly satisfying, enjoyable, meditative movie.
It’s got some incredible performances – everyone is a delight, everyone is just incredibly fun, and each scene has something interesting happening in it. [Sandra Oh] was another inspired bit of casting. Her mother, and the kid, and she’s amazing, and the motorcycle helmet rage was one of the most terrifying things I’ve seen on film – and a flopping penis, that’s always good.
The Big Lebowski is like a bowl of noodles I could eat every single day, and it would be endlessly emitting new flavors. It’s just incredible. There is like an academic reading of Big Lebowski that you could go about on forever…this polemic about war, maybe specifically World War II, and then it’s like this commentary on Hollywood, like a spoof. Then, it’s just a great weed movie. And then the performances are just ridiculous. Jeff Bridges is doing, I mean, Olivier level acting.
It’s ridiculous that there’s a monologue in the limousine… he comes out of the limo that Maude sent him, and then another driver immediately – which is just the most hilarious visual, just going from one limo to another limo. Then, he gets in there holding his White Russian, and then has to explain himself, and he stammers, and each thought is so clear, but leads nowhere.
There are no scenes that aren’t fun. Also, I don’t understand the movie, which is kind of a great feeling to have. I don’t fully understand the plot, and I’ve seen it 100 times. It’s a very unique movie in the sense that I don’t know what’s going on every time I see it.
That’s sort of the oldest movie I still love, meaning a movie from my youth that I still can’t get enough of. It’s just so exciting, and – this is gonna sound douchey – there’s more propulsion to that movie than any movie that’s ever been made, it feels like. It’s just so fast. It’s like a car accelerating, and it just never stops accelerating. I mean, think about the beginning sequence of that movie: It’s so fun, and it ends with the coke sequence. I can’t imagine a movie that just keeps going that hard. It’s tremendous.
Obviously, [there’s] such a performance from Pesci. I am deathly afraid of this small man. And Bracco: She’s amazing. That to me is another thing – I love portrayals of weird marriages. I feel like Husbands and Wives is my favorite Woody Allen movie. [Goodfellas] is a perverse love story at the end of the day, and I love it.
It was such an important part of my youth. I think more than any other movie, it changed my idea of what movies were. I wasn’t an actor then, but Pulp Fiction sort of…How do I put it? It was what, as a young actor, [showed me] this is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to be this vital. We’re trying to be this fun. We’re trying to break the rules this much. I think it changed American independent filmmaking.
For me, it was Travolta [who stood out]. I don’t know why. When I think of Pulp Fiction, the image I think about most is him getting blown away while reading Modesty Blaise on the can. Of all the images in Pulp Fiction, that’s the one that sticks in my head the most. We spent this whole movie falling in love with him, dancing with Uma Thurman, and accidentally blowing a guy’s head off. There’s so much going on, and then he meets his demise while reading a book while taking a shit, and there’s so much pathos in that image.
Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson. I was secretly thrilled that Sofia Coppola, who was panned for Godfather III, made such a triumphant movie so – it was so cool. I think it’s the single coolest movie I’ve ever seen. I haven’t revisited it in a long time, it just meant a lot to me at the time.
Partially, I think it’s like I identified very strongly with the idea of being a stranger. I could talk to my therapist for a long time about this, but for me, it was like an Asian-American movie, because the idea of being a stranger in Asia was, to me, more of an Asian-American experience than it was a white American experience. That portrayal felt very inside baseball to me, and I identified very strongly with it.
Perhaps it really is psychologically a commentary on me feeling Asian in white America, but I identified with that situation in a very personal way. It always meant more to me than I think the film should have, but I really have a lot of affection for it. I should revisit it, and I wonder if it’ll remain on my list, but I suspect it would.
Have you Googled around to find out what is said at the end, or all of the theories?
There’s a French movie called La Belle Noiseuse. The movie is about the abusive relationship between a painter and his muse, and model. It’s a four-hour movie with a cigarette intermission, and they battle through the whole movie. He’s trying to make this painting that he was commissioned to make, and you never see what he’s painting, and at the end of the movie he delivers the painting to his patron, and it’s a beautiful painting, but then the filmmaker reveals that he has the real painting bricked up behind a wall, because the truth is that terrible, and you should not see the truth.
He’s been a television star, recording artist, wine cooler pitchman, and Idaho real estate tycoon, but Bruce Willis is best known for his films — and his latest, this weekend’s Death Wish remake, returns him to the wounded tough guy mode that helped launch him to worldwide fame. Not too shabby for a guy who’s been cranking out movies for more than 25 years — and whose filmography includes some of the most beloved hits of the last quarter century. In honor of this latest achievement, we decided now would be the perfect time to take a fond look back at some of Mr. Willis’ brightest critical highlights, and you know what that means…yippee-ki-yay, it’s time for Total Recall!
(Photo by Miramax Films)
By the early ‘90s, Willis seemed to lose his footing for a bit, vacillating between tired action-hero retreads like Striking Distance and high-profile duds like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Billy Bathgate. But by the middle of the decade, he started to to regain his script-picking mojo, passing up big paychecks in favor of smaller, more warmly received indie films like Mortal Thoughts — and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which proved Willis hadn’t lost any of his physical, comedic, or dramatic gifts by offering him a role that gave him a chance to use all three (not to mention one of the most memorable lines in the script). “It’s the movie equivalent of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer,” wrote Mick LaSalle for the San Francisco Chronicle.
(Photo by Alan Markfield/TriStar Pictures)
Plenty of people would love to take the opportunity to travel back in time and see our younger selves, but Rian Johnson’s Looper takes this premise and adds a nasty twist. When a hit man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) realizes his latest quarry is his older self (Willis) — an event known among his peers as “closing the loop” — he muffs the job, allowing him(self) to escape and setting in motion a high-stakes pursuit that puts a widening circle of people in danger. Tense, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, Looper may suffer from some of the same scientific story flaws as other time travel movies, but it also manages to turn its by-now-familiar basic ingredients into an uncommonly affecting and thought-provoking sci-fi drama. “Looper imagines a world just near enough to look familiar,” mused Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, “and just futuristic enough to be chillingly askew.”
(Photo by Niko Tavernise/Focus Features)
Willis joined Wes Anderson’s repertory quirk factory with 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom, which found the director focusing on a New England island in 1965 where of a pair of tweens (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) run away together, causing a kerfuffle that throws the lives of the boy’s scoutmaster (Edward Norton), the girl’s parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), and the local sheriff (Willis) into chaos. “The usual complaints and caveats about Anderson — he’s precious, his characters have no grounding in the real world — can be made about Moonrise Kingdom,” admitted the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Steven Rea. “But so what?”
(Photo by 20th Century Fox Film Corp.)
A man, a tank top, and a high rise full of murderous terrorists. It seems like such a simple formula — hence the many, many thoughtless imitations that followed — but the original Die Hard was far greater than the sum of its reductive parts, thanks largely to the bruised, wisecracking humanity Willis brought to what could have been just another chin-jutting tough-guy role. Although the franchise would quickly spiral off into silliness, its first installment remains an action classic. “For what it is, this is the top model,” argued ReelViews’ James Berardinelli. “Flash, bang, and witty one-liners all included.”
(Photo by Paramount Pictures)
An ensemble dramedy that brought to life Richard Russo’s book about an aging ne’er-do-well who’s forced to confront (or at least acknowledge) the error of his ways in a small New York town, Nobody’s Fool quietly matched its smart and funny script with an impeccable cast that included Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy, Melanie Griffith, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and — as the spendthrift construction company owner who spends much of the movie trading quips with Newman — Bruce Willis. Although it made a pittance at the box office, most of the critics who watched it came away impressed; as Scott Weinberg pointed out for eFilmCritic, “Nobody’s Fool offers a hell of a lot more than just Paul Newman at his very best, although that alone would make the flick worthy of your attention.”
Any time director Terry Gilliam manages to wrangle one of his films through the studio system, it’s a cause for celebration — and that goes double for a picture like Twelve Monkeys, which almost seamlessly weds Gilliam’s signature flights of fancy with good old-fashioned commercialism to produce a knotty time travel story starring a pair of matinee idols (Willis and Brad Pitt) in an apocalyptic thriller that never stops asking questions — or forcing the audience to answer their own as they hustle to keep up with the unfolding drama. “There’s always overripe method to his madness,” observed Janet Maslin for the New York Times, “but in the new 12 Monkeys Mr. Gilliam’s methods are uncommonly wrenching and strong.”
(Photo by Buena Vista Pictures)
As the ‘90s wore on, Willis tended to gravitate toward quiet dramatic roles that sublimated his famous smirking charisma — a trend that reached its commercial apex with The Sixth Sense, the supernatural thriller that introduced writer/director M. Night Shyamalan to the world, turned Donnie Wahlberg into a character actor, and doomed Haley Joel Osment to a life of hearing people whisper “I see dead people” whenever he walked into a room. Some of its luster has been lost thanks to Shyamalan’s downward career spiral, but Sense was one of the biggest movies of 1999, and for some very good reasons — not the least of which was a Willis performance that helped inspired the San Jose Mercury News’ Charlie McCollum to call the film “An intense, haunting, often beautifully crafted character study and meditation on the nature of death and life after death.”
(Photo by 20th Century Fox)
For awhile, it looked like 1995’s <em>Die Hard with a Vengeance</em> would be the last time audiences got to see Willis saving the day as Detective John McClane — but the lure of the beloved franchise (and its attendant paycheck) eventually proved too strong to resist, and in 2007, he finally returned with <em>Live Free or Die Hard</em>. Swapping out the earlier films’ Everyman conceit for a tongue-in-cheek humor that wholeheartedly embraced the silliness inherent in the series, <em>Live Free</em> amped up the action to such a ridiculous extent that it might as well have been a non-<em>Die Hard</em> movie — but the result was still entertaining enough to satisfy critics like Jonathan F. Richards of Film.com, who wrote, “Movie characters like McClane are the Paul Bunyans and John Henrys and Pecos Bills of our age, the stuff of tall tales spun with the technology of an age whose campfires are found in multiplexes with stadium seating.”
(Photo by Dimension Films)
A blackly cartoonish noir whose garish violence seeps into every millimeter of the frame, Sin City united a stellar ensemble cast (including Willis, Mickey Rourke, Elijah Wood, Clive Owen, and Benicio del Toro) on a journey into blight, corruption, betrayal, and death. Not exactly cheerful stuff, in other words, and plenty of viewers took issue with what they saw as the movie’s misogynistic overtones — but for fans of the genre, Sin City provided one of the most hard-hitting and skillfully crafted entries in years. “It’s a hard, viciously funny little movie, one with all the subtlety of a billy club,” admitted Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek. “But there’s artistry here, too.”
(Photo by DreamWorks)
Willis might be most famous for his smirk, but he’s made pretty good use of his voice, too — scoring a Top Five hit single with “Respect Yourself,” lending his pipes to the Look Who’s Talking movies, and entering the vocal booth for projects as varied as the Apocalypse video game and the Bruno the Kid cartoon series. Oh, and there’s also Over the Hedge, 2006’s star-studded adaptation of the syndicated comic strip about a crafty raccoon (Willis) who helps a group of woodland critters (voiced by Garry Shandling, Steve Carell, Wanda Sykes, William Shatner, among others) cope with their habitat being encroached upon by a suburban neighborhood. “Over the Hedge may be ‘just’ a cartoon,” admitted Roger Moore for the Orlando Sentinel. “But it’s also a biting and funny jab at SUV-MSG Nation.”
Remakes and reboots are all too common these days, and every time a new one is announced, movie fans tend to let out a collective sigh. We decided to ask our followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram what movies they thought should never be remade, and we got an understandably enthusiastic response.
Robert Zemeckis’ beloved Back to the Future made it to the top of the list on both Twitter and Instagram (it was #3 on Facebook), so fans will be happy to know that Zemeckis himself has said it will remain untouched as long as he’s alive. The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption also both made it into the top 5 on all three platforms, so here’s hoping the studios don’t get any funny ideas about them either. See below for the full list, vote on the films you least want to see remade, and tell us in the comments what else you think should be kept sacred for cinematic posterity.
As usual, the first of the month brings a wealth of great movies to watch online. This week, Netflix and Amazon Prime have added some bona fide classics, a few Oscar-winners, a pair of animated Disney favorites, and even an acclaimed film from this year. Read on for the full list of Certified Fresh picks.
Steven Spielberg’s influential thriller stars Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw as an unlikely trio who set out to sea to take down a giant great white shark terrorizing a New England resort town. All of its sequels are also available on Netflix.
Available now on Netflix: Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3, Jaws: The Revenge
Acclaimed Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s latest drama centers on a father’s progressively more complicated efforts to ensure a bright academic future for his daughter.
Available now on: Netflix
Casey Affleck and Morgan Freeman star in Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, an adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel about a private detective whose investigation into the kidnapping of a local girl uncovers a web of corruption.
Available now on: Netflix
John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel and many more star in Quentin Tarantino’s celebrated second film, a series of vignettes about various criminals in Los Angeles.
Available now on: Netflix
Noah Baumbach’s dysfunctional family dramedy follows a feuding married couple (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) whose impending divorce takes a toll on their two sons.
Available now on: Netflix
Gael García Bernal stars in Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Oscar-nominated drama that follows the stories of three very different people who are connected by a terrible car crash.
Available now on: Netflix
Fernando Meirelles’ explosive coming-of-age drama set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro centers on a pair of friends who grow up together, enter the criminal world, and face the consequences of their lifestyle.
Available now on: Netflix
Ming-Na Wen and Eddie Murphy lend their voices to Disney’s animated retelling of a Chinese folk tale about a brave young girl who dresses like a man to join the emperor’s army.
Available now on: Netflix
In one of his most memorable roles, Robin Williams stars in this drama as an English teacher at a private academy who inspires his students with his unconventional methods.
Available now on: Netflix
Kate Maberly stars in Agnieszka Holland’s adaptation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel about a young girl who discovers a magical garden on her uncle’s estate.
Available now on: Netflix
Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish star in Jane Campion’s biopic focusing on the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne during the last years of Keats’ life.
Available now on: Netflix
Tate Donovan, Danny DeVito, and James Woods provided memorable voices for Disney’s take on the Greek demi-god, who struggles against the forces of Hades to protect those around him.
Available now on: Netflix
Jared Leto, Marlon Wayans, Jennifer Connelly, and Ellen Burstyn star in Darren Aronofsky’s bleak exploration of the nature and consequences of addiction.
Available now on: Netflix
Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis headline an all-star cast in Martin Scorsese’s stylized portrayal of the rise of criminal power in New York’s Five Points neighborhood during the mid-1800s.
Available now on: Netflix
Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig star in Noah Baumbach’s dramedy about a New Yorker who agrees to housesit in Los Angeles for his brother and ends up falling for his brother’s assistant.
Available now on: Netflix
Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins star in this thriller about a man on trail for shooting his unfaithful wife who duels with a young, hot-shot district attorney in court.
Available now on: Netflix
This Oscar-winning documentary charts the efforts of animal trainer-turned-activist Richard O’Barry in battling the culture of dolphin hunting in the town of Taiji, Japan.
Available now on: Amazon Prime
This moody horror film from Ti West centers on a pair of amateur ghost hunters who seek to record proof of the ghostly spirits in the hotel where they work before it closes down for good.
Available now on: Amazon Prime
Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn star in this romantic comedy about a pair of cynical divorce attorneys who spend their time crashing weddings until they both meet their match in two very different women.
Available now on: Amazon Prime
Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan star in this romantic comedy based on the true story of Nanjiani’s unusual and precarious courtship with his wife, Emily.
Available now on: FandangoNOW
(Photo by First Run Features courtesy Everett Collection)
Few directors will ever be able to say that they’ve helmed both an influential documentary franchise and a James Bond film, but Michael Apted certainly can. He took the reins for the Pierce Brosnan 007 film The World Is Not Enough, and his acclaimed Up documentary series, which began in 1964 with a profile of several seven-year-olds and has checked in with the same “kids” every seven years since then, remains a singular cinematic achievement. Since making his debut over half a century ago, Apted has worked steadily in both television and film, as a documentarian and narrative filmmaker, establishing himself as one of the most prolific, most versatile directors of his era.
Apted is also known for working with celebrated actresses in acclaimed films about famous women, like Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist and Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter — both earned multiple Oscar nominations, and Spacek actually took home the Best Actress trophy. This week, Apted returns to the big screen with Unlocked, a tense spy thriller starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Douglas, Orlando Bloom, and Toni Collette. He spoke with RT about his Five Favorite Films, explained what he finds so fascinating about women’s stories, and talked about how his documentary background informs even his most outrageous films.
The first one is Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman. It’s what I saw when I was 15, and it showed me that films could be something more than just entertainment or going and staring at girls in the cinema or whatever, but film could have the kind of weight of a book or something like that. I used to be a big reader, and I loved going to the movies, but I had no sense of taste in the movies.
You know, I grew up in a suburb of London, and I went to school in the middle of London, and that’s when I found myself, one wet afternoon, in an arthouse, and there was Wild Strawberries, and that, for me, was the beginning of it all. It had so many ideas, and it played with dreams, and I thought, “Oh my God. This is quite something.” So it really was a kind of major event in my life.
RT: Had you seen many foreign or arthouse films at that point?
No, never. Never. My life had been entirely that of a middle class suburban lad who went to the movies with his friends for all sorts of reasons. This was the first time I could look at a film as an equal of a book.
Number two is Kes, Ken Loach’s film. I’d already kind of established myself in television, and I loved Italian movies and all that. And then here was a genuine British neo-realist movie, which I thought was an exquisite film. It dealt with incredibly complicated social issues, which I was very much involved in myself, with my Up series, which had already started by that time. But what I thought was so beautiful about it was that he found the metaphor of this boy and this kestrel, and he told the whole tale of the boy’s life — the stress the boy was under, and the unfairness of life — through the relationship with him and a bird, which I thought was just a brilliant filmic notion.
I mean, I’ve always loved his work. He was very influential on my generation — not that he’s much older than us, but I think he was very much our man, and, you know, he has a huge body of work in his lifetime. He never seems to stop. Stop! Right? Otherwise, we’ve all got to keep going, if you keep going. God.
Next is a documentary called Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, which is a story of then and now, of concentration camps. That had a major influence on me, again, for the poetry, if you can call it that, of the documentary, but also the way he used time, the way he used two time zones, two sets of material, to make his point, and to give the film, which obviously had some astounding, alarming images in it, but without a lot of babble, of explanation, by contrasting what it once was and what it is now. It was very moving to me, and I think that was inspirational, again, in the [Up] films I did with these children, which I’m still doing.
But I could see how you could time travel in documentary, and it makes both sets of material more powerful. Of course, the film is incredibly powerful anyway. But nonetheless, he’d found a style of doing it, a way of doing it… It’s just, the power of those images, without endless babble, was, to me, a very strong lesson.
RT: That’s an interesting notion, of time travel through documentary.
Yeah, I’ve used it a lot. I mean, we’ll get to it in a movie in a minute, but that, to me, was very, very striking — not just the material, but the whole structure of it, the whole idea of it.
And then, my fourth one is a comedy, and I was torn between Some Like It Hot, which I love, but my vote went to Spinal Tap, which I thought was more contemporary. It made me feel such an old man, but…
One of the things about Spinal Tap — I was doing a documentary [The Long Way Home] about Russian rock and roll in, I don’t know, the late ’80s or something like that, and it was about a Russian band coming — it was around Glasnost when they came across to America to make the record, and it was about Glasnost, and the co-production, as it were, saw the closing of the gap between East and West, as it were. That’s what it set out to be, but it turned out to be a disaster. Not the film, but the whole object of the enterprise, because it split the band up, and the Russian band never made another record. They were completely disoriented by being in the West and all that. So it was one of those documentaries where what you set out to do, you don’t do, and you do something else, which is usually better than what you were going to do.
The point of the story is that I showed them Spinal Tap. They fell about, and they couldn’t speak a word of English, but they absolutely got it. It was just, again, the power of the humor and the power of the images, and all this kind of stuff. I mean, we were in common ground — they never understood a word of it, but they were just laughing as much I would laugh every time I saw it. That was a kind of interesting experience for me, to see how universal films can be.
RT: So you showed this film to them as you were filming the documentary?
Yeah, yeah. One evening, I brought it with me, because I’ve loved it, and I thought, well, I’ll try it. I’ll show it to them, and they might throw me out, or whatever. [laughs] And I thought, let’s just try it. Let’s see what they thought. And so I put it on, and they just were absolutely gobsmacked by it, and just were crying with laughter. It was a great bonding moment, you know. I mean, the music was the bonding moment that I was doing with them, but it was sweet to see humor as a great bonding thing.
The last one is Pulp Fiction. Me and my, as he was then, I suppose, eight-year-old, nine-year-old son, thought it was great. I just loved, again, the way [Quentin Tarantino] used time, the way he moved backwards and forwards in time, which I thought was sort of groundbreaking, although it may not have been. But I thought it was. And I saw the energy and the vigor of it all, and just the images of it. I just love that film.
I watch it now and again, as it were, and it never palls for me at all, but I just thought he kind of invented a way, or kind of storytelling technique, which is sort of second nature to us all now, but again, that nonlinear business — for me, it was a revelation. I’m sure there have been other films like it, but this seemed to work so well within a very contemporary, very fast-moving, very original piece. To have the courage to play with the structure, and tell things backwards and forwards and all that sort of thing, I thought, was not just cute, or just showmanship. It actually enhanced the drama, trying to figure out where you were and what was going on. I found that a very creative effort, and so did my son, which thrilled me. He wasn’t fazed by it at all.
Ryan Fujitani for Rotten Tomatoes: A lot of your films — and perhaps some of the ones you’re best known for — feature female protagonists, and Unlocked also falls into that category. Can you talk a little bit about why it’s important to you to tell these female-centered stories?
Michael Apted: I’ve always felt that women’s lives were intrinsically more dramatic than men’s, largely because they have the issue of having children, and so at some point in their life, they have to make a decision not to have children, or to have children. And just to compare two of my women’s films, one was Sissy [Spacek] in Coal Miner’s Daughter, when she burdened with having to bring up four children and have a career. And with Gorillas in the Mist, when Dian Fossey decided to abandon all kinds of social life. Although she liked men, and she liked clothes, and all those things, she decided to go live in these godawful mountains for 15, 16 years.
I find that, at the heart of women’s stories, for me, there’s much more drama, much more emotion in it, because of the kind of expectations they have of life, how they’re expected maybe to have children, get married, blah, blah, blah. Even in something like the film I did with [John] Belushi, Continental Divide, which was directly on that motive, that there was this woman who’d gone on up and sit on the top of the mountain to follow birds around — eagles — and there was this kind of grubby newspaperman coming in and wondering what the hell was going on. Although it was a comedy, nonetheless underlying it was the fact that this woman has given up the expectations of her life to do this rather odd job, to try and see how many the eagles were and all this sort of stuff.
And Nell, too. I just found women’s stories more emotional, and that’s what I have to look for in any film I do, is the emotion, whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be between a man and a woman. It can be with an older man, or a younger boy, or whatever, but as long as some emotional center to it, then I can come up with it. And I find that that’s why I’m attracted to stories with women.
Only this one was slightly different, because this one was in place, and Noomi [Rapace] was in place and all that when I came in to do it, but nonetheless… I feel like every film I’ve done, there always seems to be women in it, which is just an instinctive choice on my part.
RT: Going back to Unlocked, in the end, it’s a propulsive spy thriller, and it’s set in a sort of heightened reality, but it sort of sits in this interesting middle ground between truly fantastical stuff — like your James Bond film or the Chronicles of Narnia film that you did — and movies that are strictly based in reality, like the documentaries you make. Does something like Unlocked hit sort of a sweet spot for you as a filmmaker who has made films in both realms?
Apted: It’s dealing with a horrendous issue. It’s slightly over-the-top and slightly unbelievable, but nonetheless it does ask questions about where we’re at or what we are, and it brings intimacy to the kind of dangerous life we’re all living, every time we go down the Underground, every time we get on a bus, or into the car. Without being too squeamish about it and all that, I found that that story took me into something that maybe people don’t think about quite enough. Not that we should all go around terrified of opening the door.
But I thought, again, it was the kind of human way of expressing what is very troubling — not that it should ruin our lives, but we should not be unaware of it. So, yeah, it does… I mean, there’s the stuff that I do, I suppose, that is in the middle ground, if you like. That’s an astute observation on your part. But I think everything I do is basically a documentary. I mean, even things as outrageous as Bond and that.
I remember with the Bond film, it was about getting gas out of the water, out of the Caspian, so I made them all go down there and have a look at it and see what was down there. We got some astonishing images. I shot some of them, in the design of the sets and all that kind stuff. It was this city in the middle of the Caspian sea. It was unbelievable. And had I not sort of said, “Well, look, I’ve got to find out how this really happens…” I find my documentary instinct always, at some point, comes to bear, and if it doesn’t, usually I don’t do a very good job. I like having that as a kind of back stop, if you know what I mean.
I was very upset when I did Gorky Park, because they wouldn’t let us in. We did go in to start, but they threw us out when they realized what we were doing, that we were adapting this book. And they said, “There is no crime in Russia. Get out.” And they threw us out in a rather unceremonious, rather scary way, because this was pre-Gorbachev.
But again, I felt… “God, I didn’t know what they had for breakfast,” and things like that, and how they live and all that. “How am I going to do this if I don’t know this stuff?” You know, I do my best with it, but I always love to have a kind of documentary or reality base to what I do.
Unlocked opens in limited release this Friday, September 1.
(Photo by Jim Spellman/Getty Images)
Over the past decade, horror films have benefitted from the talents of a number of young, ambitious filmmakers who have seamlessly blended arthouse sensibilities with more traditional elements of the genre. One of the recent standouts in the field is Adam Wingard, whose home invasion thriller You’re Next and John Carpenter-esque psycho-actioner The Guest have cemented him as a talent to watch.
Wingard has already been tapped to helm the upcoming Godzilla vs. Kong film, as well as a remake of the cult favorite South Korean slasher flick I Saw the Devil, but this Friday, his live-action adaptation of the popular Japanese manga and anime Death Note drops exclusively on Netflix. To celebrate the occasion, he offered up his Five Favorite Films, two of which will probably surprise no one.
This is a film that personifies perfection to me on all levels. I learn something different from it upon each watch. It truly is a labyrinth of a film that you literally get stuck in, or at least I seem to have. Oddly enough, because of how much it deviated from the book, I was sort of let down by it the first time I saw it, but I would just keep coming back to it until it eventually became my favorite film. Almost every film on this list is like that, I have to revisit films many times before they fully resonate with me.
Another film that has a real sense of precision that manages to mix it up with an almost mumblecore approach to the dialogue scenes. This film is obviously scary and filled with top-notch sci-fi concepts, but I feel like it doesn’t get enough credit for just how grounded the performances feel, to the point that sometimes I can barely understand what they are saying. I like epic haunted house stories, as you can tell by my first two picks.
For a few years I always had a copy of Gerry on me during all my travels just in case I got the itch to watch it, which was often. The only reason that I don’t do this anymore is because I am waiting to experience an HD version and it has yet to be released. Pure atmospheric experiment, this film both made me yearn to go traveling in the desert and it also made me afraid of it. The only film that I can truly say is like meditation on celluloid.
The film that made me aware of filmmaking. I owe a lot to Tarantino, especially for how he uses music in his films. Ever since I saw PF I’ve been obsessed with chasing the perfect soundtrack.
I think this was the best theater going experience of my life — not just as a kid, but ever. It’s not often that a film actually lives up to its hype, and boy was I hyped up for this one. It’s basically a horror film for kids and even stars kids.
Death Note will be available to stream exclusively on Netflix on Friday, August 25.
An incredibly prolific actor with more than 100 movies to his credit (earning billions in lifetime grosses and an Oscar nomination along the way), Samuel L. Jackson is Hollywood royalty — and in this weekend’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard, he teams up with fellow superstar Ryan Reynolds for a good old-fashioned buddy action comedy. To celebrate yet another addition to Mr. Jackson’s incredible filmography, we decided now would be the perfect time to take an appreciative look back at some of his career’s brightest critical highlights while inviting you to rank your own favorites. It’s time for Total Recall!
(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Dolph Lundgren (Film: Universal Soldier, Rocky IV, A View to a Kill, The Expendables, Masters of the Universe; TV: Arrow, Justice League Dark) is a household name when it comes to studly bad-assery with a slight tongue in a cheek somewhere. Now Don’t Kill It — directed by Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers, Tales of Halloween) — opens this week with Lundgren as a snarky demon-hunter trying to save a small Mississippi town. This one has a sense of humor a la Evil Dead 2 or Dead Alive and more than enough hilariously campy gore to please fans of the genre. Mr. Lundgren graciously spoke to us about the films that he has always loved. The list of his Five Favorite Films is here:
One movie I like is The Godfather, the original, because it’s got everything. The lighting, the acting, the story, the performances, direction — everything put together. You can always watch it. If you’ve seen it 20 times, you could see it another 20 times, you know? There’s always little details — that’s the thing, attention to detail.
I like Gladiator, the one with Russell Crowe, because it’s an epic and they used CGI really well, I thought. I like those movies. A lot of films I’ve done, it was about the hero’s journey and all that Joseph Campbell stuff. That’s a good one.
Unforgiven is a good movie, I think. Simplicity and epic qualities, and acting and everything. Story.
Spartacus is a great movie, too. It’s also one of those epic pictures. The story is great. I think what’s cool is you had a young director. The fact that he had to walk on there — Kubrick was in his 20s and they fired the original director, and it was produced by Kirk Douglas, so being a star producer — I can kind of relate to that. He brought this kid on set, and didn’t really know him. He turned out to be this incredible genius who did these incredible battle scenes, and just some beautiful stuff in there with real extras — they had 5,000 extras. If you call “Cut! Reset!,” it took half a day to put everybody back in their positions. That’s an accomplishment, I think. Scale, but also keeping it intimate in those close-ups.
Also, they said that [Kubrick] always designed the last shot of his movies first. He tried to sum up the whole picture in the last shot of the movie, like Dr. Strangelove. The guy sitting on the bomb, falling down. That’s a classic shot. In Spartacus, it was Spartacus hanging on the cross being crucified, and there’s a row of crosses leading all the way to Rome, I guess, to the horizon. Then his son is born a free man at his feet, and his wife says, “Spartacus, please die.” Because he was so tough, he wouldn’t die on the cross. She’s asking him to die, while she’s sitting there with his son who is free now. He’s not a slave anymore. Anyways, it’s a beautiful movie.
Have you ever done a movie last scene first?
Have I? No. I know when we shot Rocky IV, Sly [Stallone] said, “Hey, you guys should shoot the ending first while we still have money and everybody’s fresh [laughing].” So we shot the ending of Rocky IV first.
I haven’t directed in almost 10 years, but I’ve got something planned — hopefully this year or maybe next year. But yeah, we’ll probably try to do the same. I try to design the last shot first to see how it works. At least, it’s a good theory of trying to tell the story in the last shot again.
That’s one you can see a million times and and it’s like a whole new style, and dialogue, and all that stuff.
Kerr Lordygan for Rotten Tomatoes: I saw Don’t Kill It, and I fell in love with it. I wasn’t expecting it to be so funny. You’re very funny in it. You had to learn a Missouri dialect there?
Dolph Lundgren: Oh, yeah. It was a funny movie. The whole thing: the guys talks a lot, the dialect, the fact that there’s so much verbiage. Usually in action movies — which is mostly what I’ve done, people don’t talk that much; you’ve got to do without dialogue. But that’s what I liked about it when I read it. The guy over-explains things, and I thought it was funny. I tried to make the guy funny. Make him comical.
I’m doing this arc on Arrow, and I was taking so many ideas there and used it for Don’t Kill It because the guy on Arrow talks quite a bit, too. It’s quite efficient sometimes, effective on screen. A big guy — I think no one expected it.
RT: It was great. Did anything surprise you about doing the movie?
Lundgren: I had a lot of fun. I had more fun than I thought. It was a little bit of a breakthrough because you are a slave to the material as an actor, and that one — because I talk a lot and because it’s funny — I felt much freer after that movie doing other things because it affected me a little bit — like I said — on Arrow. The kind of movies now, everything I’ve done recently, I have a little more fun in front of the camera.
RT: Did you expect it to be that funny when you agreed to do it?
Lundgren: Not really, no. I knew that the character was entertaining, the main character. I haven’t done many horror movies, and I’m skeptical to all that about demons and s— like that. But I read the script, and somehow it pulled me in enough about halfway through. I said, “If it could pull me in, then maybe it will pull the audience in,” because I’m sure they’ll be skeptical, too, of this thing — especially if I’m playing the lead in it. It worked, I guess.
RT: Lots of really fun gore in this one, too. Funny and well done.
Lundgren: Yeah, because Mendez, he doesn’t care. He’d have buckets of blood standing by all the time. He doesn’t care. I like that. There’s so many movies that’s, “There’s too much blood!” Did you ever get punched in the nose? Do you know how much you bleed when somebody breaks your nose? It’s like there’s blood everywhere down to your knees on your shirt. I used to do martial arts. I know how much blood comes out of a nose. But in movies, they don’t want to do that because people can’t take it anymore. People are a sanitized version of reality.
Don’t Kill It opens on Friday, Mar. 3, 2017 in limited release.
Photo by: Joshua Blanchard / Stringer / Getty Images
Michelle Rodriguez of The Fast and the Furious, Lost, and Avatar fame is a busy woman, riding off the excitement of (Re) Assignment at the Toronto International Film Festival while preparing for tomorrow’s release of her latest drama, Milton’s Secret. As an action-drama star, Rodriguez herself is a fan of films that entice the senses, as we found out when we got to ask her about her Five Favorite Films. See the list here:
Stanley [Kubrick] has an innate ability to… Whatever he’s doing metaphorically with a concept, he can transfer that to all the senses. I feel he does the same tone visually that he’s doing phonetically — that you can actually hear. He does it with all his senses. With Clockwork, he just went to town.
Such a hard stance to take something really complex, turn it into a metaphor, and translate it with light and sound in two hours . [Christopher Nolan]’s just so damned good. I was dancing around the room all, “No he didn’t!” when I saw that movie [laughing].
This one is stupid but it’s not. Those [directors], man. What [they] did with color, it’s almost like color didn’t exist before [that]. Color was around a couple years, but that darn movie made it pop. They dance with it. They danced with sound, danced with music, danced with the metaphors of the theme of the movie. I like when it all comes together, and they did a great job with that. Magical.
Just because Quentin [Tarantino] did such an amazing job. I mean, he’s just so gangster, he’s so good at it. I can’t even explain it, you know. Everything all comes together, and when you can’t explain it, it’s like, “Wait, what happened?”
The metaphor, man. The fact that they would take this age old, vilified idea of a powerful woman and take away that dark mystique that’s been repeated throughout history and in such a mean way to all women. Like, anytime you see in cartoons, in movies, anything from, like, the ’50s, the ’40s, you would see this dark bitter woman. And you would see her explored in a way where she always represented evil, but never with a sense of justified evil. Rewrote the history books on the vilification of a powerful woman. I thought that was really, really powerful for Disney to do that. It’s like taking an old metaphor that’s been repeated for so many years and putting it on its head. It makes you think twice when you look at a person that’s a “bad guy.” That‘s a powerful message for kids to not be judgmental.
(Photo by Getty Images / Jesse Grant / Stringer)
RJ Mitte rose to awareness as Walter White, Jr. in Breaking Bad. While Mitte’s own case of cerebral palsy is less severe than that of the character he played, he serves as spokesperson for several organizations devoted to helping people with disabilities — including actors and others in the media. He also keeps up with his acting career, as evidenced by his most recent film outing, Who’s Driving Doug.
Mitte talked to us here at Rotten Tomatoes about five of his favorite movies — a choice selection of action and sci-fi. You can see if the films that excite him get you excited too:
All these stories piling together and crossing over — I think that is the simplicity of life — these five degrees of separation that divide us all. I think it was a great cast of people; it’s a good story. Films that I enjoy are films that tell stories and not necessarily on the bounds of believable, but in life, anything can happen. I like action films. I guess Pulp Fiction is fairly violent, but I’m an action film kind of guy. It depends on what I’m in the mood for when it comes down to it.
The first one with Brandon Lee. The whole set — it was a really cool set — I liked the whole vibe of it with the martial arts. I was a Brandon Lee fan, and that was a fairly bad-ass movie. That whole Hell’s Kitchen vibe in New York — that whole realm just has this cool mystifying vibe. It looked like it would be a fun set.
I watched Serenity before Firefly [the TV series it was based on]. In 2000, binge-viewing wasn’t something that we did; we didn’t have access to that. If you missed a TV series, you just missed it. Or you’d record it on your VHS, right? It was a chore. In 2002 I was more of a country boy; I was always outside. But I like the whole idea of Serenity, the whole world, that outer rim world that we imagine that one day we will be [part of]. I actually felt this wasn’t too far out of our limits. You look at that ship, and it’s a junky old beat up ship. You would think after a thousand years, we will have things like that — that will fly and that will do things like that. We do. We have shuttles and they don’t look too far off [from those]. [That world is] only going to get closer into our grasp.
I feel like at one point or another, this is everyone’s favorite movie. Danny Elfman is amazing. I’m a big fan of stop motion. I really have an admiration and appreciation for [it]. I think they do such an amazing job, and they take so long to make. It’s almost flawless. You can’t even tell that they’re fake toys. It looks like animation. I like the music; it was amazing. Danny Elfman always does it with his scores, and Tim Burton is really rad. It’s done so well for the time. That’s a movie that will come around every so often that will just hang in the air and will never — no matter how good the graphics get, or how good your TV gets — at the end of the day, it will never folly. There are some things you’ll put on and go “It looked like that?” But when you watch Nightmare Before Christmas, you know it never gets bad or old. The music is always amazing, and they worked really hard. And that rings through. Stop motion is so great.
The vibe of it — I always felt like this was an all-around bad-ass cop movie. I could try to go into detail about certain things about it that stood out to me, about how it all takes place in one day and how he sets him up throughout the whole day. It was done right. It was one of those movies that was just set up right.
Who’s Driving Doug is now showing in limited release and on premiere Video-on-Demand.
This weekend, Star Wars: The Force Awakens came within a hair of becoming the top grossing film of all-time, leading the pack easily for a third straight weekend while the latest film from Quentin Tarantino expanded nationwide and made some noise of its own.
Coming within only $20M of the all-time domestic box office record in only 17(!) days, Star Wars: The Force Awakens remained at number one for a third consecutive weekend taking in an estimated $88.3M bringing its out-of-this-galaxy total to $740M, again in only 17 days. Current champ Avatar should be moving into the center lane to let The Force Awakens pass it on the left as early as tomorrow, no later than Tuesday. Since Avatar‘s ascent to the throne in 2010 (including a Special Edition re-release) there have been a couple of films where people thought, will this be the one to topple James Cameron’s stranglehold on the charts? But neither Batman nor The Avengers could put up a fight, though they valiantly tried. Jurassic World shocked the world with its $652M take from this summer, which eclipsed the initial release of Titanic ($600M) but even Chris Pratt fell just a little short. I think, however, that when the rumblings started that there would be a new Star Wars film on the horizon, people starting thinking that this could be it. And then the first trailer came out and fanboys everywhere wet their pants in anticipation. And when the opening night/day/weekend records came crashing down, it was a forgone conclusion that Avatar would fall too, but in less than three weeks? After its third weekend, Avatar wasn’t even halfway to its final total ($352M of $750M). Titanic was barely a quarter of the way to its final total ($157M of $600M). Yes, those two films were anomalies, having extremely slim declines week-to-week and sometimes even increasing after being in theaters for weeks on end (let’s not forget, Titanic was number one for about 4 months straight) so it’s unlikely The Force Awakens is only halfway to its ultimate final gross, but hitting a billion dollars is nowhere near out of the equation at this point. Internationally, The Force Awakens made another $96M this weekend bringing its foreign total up to $770M and its worldwide cume up to $1.51B with China still to come. For reference sake, the highest grossing U.S. film released in China is Furious 7 which made around $370M earlier this year.
What’s even more fascinating is if you look at the all-time chart adjusted for inflation, where Gone With the Wind has ruled the roost for decades with a current adjusted $1.7B gross. The Force Awakens could end up on the top 10 of that list if it ends up making over $938M, which is what Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs made over its many releases since 1937. Any way you want to look at it, we’re living through a momentous box office/pop culture moment. And I think, it’s a moment unlike any other we’ll see in at least my lifetime. Anticipation for The Force Awakens was unlike any other I’ve seen and even looking ahead at the release schedule for the next 10-15 years I’m hard pressed to come up with another movie (including the new Star Wars films) that will reach this level of box office domination. I can only hope right now James Cameron is putting the final touches on the artwork of the Na’vi waving at the Millennium Falcon as it flies by his records. With the domestic record set to fall within the next 48 hours, the next one we’re looking at is worldwide box office where The Force Awakens is currently number six all time with Furious 7 ($1.515B), The Avengers ($1.519B) and Jurassic World ($1.669B) set to fall as well. Which would leave only Titanic (2.186B) and Avatar ($2.788B) left to go, though those final two could take a little time.
The new dream team of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg held up nicely in second place for a second straight weekend with their comedy Daddy’s Home slipping 25% to $29M, bringing its total up to $93.7M. I have to imagine Daddy’s Home Again is already in the works – let’s hope it doesn’t end up like Ted 2 or any number of comedy sequels that should have never been made. Why can we never just appreciate what we have?
It’s pretty amazing to me how every Quentin Tarantino films feels like an event when it comes out. Ever since he burst onto the scene with Reservoir Dogs in 1992 ($2.8M final gross) and then took the world by storm with his Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction ($108M in 1994), every 2-3 years Tarantino releases another film that is completely different from his last one, yet feels like a natural progression, like somehow all his films are within the same universe, just in different parts of it. This weekend his latest film, The Hateful Eight shot up an estimated $16.2M in its first full weekend nationwide (after a 100 theater opening last week), bringing its total up to $29.5M. It has a chance of becoming his third straight $100M film after 2012’s Django Unchained ($162M in 2012/2013 – his highest grossing film to date) and 2009’s Inglourious Basterds which made $120M. Both of those films grossed north of $30M in their opening weekends so The Hateful Eight may need some help to get to $100M, and a B CinemaScore isn’t promising, but the film looks like it might be a player during this awards season so it could get there.
There were no other new or expanding films this first weekend of 2016, so the rest of the top 10 looks a lot like last week. Fourth place belonged to Sisters which slipped a slim 11% in its third weekend to an estimated $12.6M bringing its total up to $61.7M. It’s no Daddy’s Home but I’d much rather see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler get back together for another film. Also holding up well over New Year’s weekend was Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip which fell only 10% to $11.8M, according to estimates, bringing its total up to $67M after three weeks. There can be no doubt there will be another Alvin film coming out soon… The Chipmunk Awakens perhaps?
There was less joy for Joy which fell 39% in its second weekend, falling to number six with an estimated $10.4M, bringing its total to $38.7M. A stronger hold in its second weekend would have been nice for this awards hopeful, but that seems to be the trend for prestige pics so far this year. On the other hand, you have The Big Short which fell only 14.5% in its fourth weekend to an estimated $9M bringing the ensemble film up to $33M. Eighth place belonged to Will Smith’s Concussion which held up reasonably well in its second weekend, taking in an estimated $8M, a drop of 24% from last weekend, bringing its total up to $25M. In ninth place was the unnecessary remake Point Break which dropped 30% from its opening weekend to an estimated $6.8M, bringing its cume to $22M. And rounding out the top 10 in its seventh weekend is the final chapter in the Hunger Games saga, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 which took in an additional $4.6M, according to estimates, bringing it’s total to $274M.
Outside of the top 10 saw The Revenant dip only 5% from last weekend while remaining in only 4 theaters, taking in an additional $450,000 this weekend, bringing its cume up to $1.3M so far. It expands nationwide next weekend. And opening in limited release was the stop-motion animated Anomalisa which took in a decent $140,000, according to estimates, from only 4 theaters for a per screen average of $35,000.
The top ten films grossed $196.8M which was up 56% from last year when The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies remained at number one for a third straight weekend with $21.7; and up 66% from 2013 when Frozen reclaimed the top spot in its seventh weekend $19.6M.
Since making his debut with Reservoir Dogs more than 20 years ago, Quentin Tarantino has enjoyed one of the most consistently critically lauded careers of any director in modern Hollywood, and he’s back this weekend with the grim ‘n’ gritty Western ensemble piece The Hateful Eight. Once again, early reviews are solid — which means now is the perfect time to dedicate a feature to taking a fond look back at his earlier efforts. Cover the kids’ ears and keep an eye on Marvin in the back seat, because this week, we’re serving up Total Recall, Tarantino style!
The appeal of anthology films — that audiences can see the work of multiple directors under one narrative umbrella — can also be one of their major drawbacks: The results, as in 1995’s Four Rooms, often strike some viewers as wildly, painfully uneven. As this particular outing proved, success isn’t guaranteed even if you bring together a handful of the industry’s most critically beloved and/or commercially ascendant filmmakers; although Four Rooms united Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders, and Alexandre Rockwell to tell the promise-rich tale of a beleaguered bellhop (Tim Roth) making his way through a series of progressively weirder hotel rooms on New Year’s Eve, only Rodriguez’s segment escaped heaps of withering critical scorn, and the film barely eked out $4 million at the box office. But a 14 percent Tomatometer rating means that a few critics liked it — such as Boxoffice Magazine’s Shlomo Schwartzberg, who shrugged and said, “As a whole, Four Rooms is only diverting, and pretty mindless, but at its best it’s a lot of fun.”
Forged by the bond of friendship between Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez — as well as their shared love of sloppy, bloody, low-budget exploitation flicks — 2007’s Grindhouse found the two directors splitting a three-hour double bill that took audiences from cheeky zombie terror (Rodriguez’s Planet Terror) to seethingly violent high-octane action (Tarantino’s Death Proof). At 67 percent, Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse got the short end of the Tomatometer stick, but plenty of critics still enjoyed his gleefully depraved look at a homicidal stuntman (Kurt Russell) with a fondness for murdering young ladies. “I’ve rarely seen a filmmaker, in current Hollywood at least, expose his sexual and sadistic kinks on screen with such shameless glee,” observed an admiring Kevin N. Laforest for the Montreal Film Journal.
What if Quentin Tarantino tried his hand at an Agatha Christie mystery? Filmgoers got their answer to that question — sort of — with 2015’s The Hateful Eight, in which a rogue’s gallery of typically Tarantino-esque characters find themselves bound up in lethally close quarters while a murder mystery inexorably tightens its way toward a gleefully violent conclusion. It’s a setup rich with possibilities for the director’s signature style of filmmaking, and in a fair number of respects, critics said Hateful didn’t disappoint: Tarantino assembled a stellar ensemble cast, including Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and fed them heaping servings of the sort of pungently knotty dialogue fans have come to expect. Yet while Tarantino’s films have often benefited from an approach to violence that could be charitably described as “enthusiastic,” some scribes admitted to a certain amount of discomfort with the particular brand of bloodshed he unleashed here, identifying a darker, meaner strain that explored racism and misogyny without necessarily offering illumination. “The Hateful Eight is a movie about the worst aspects of human nature, which is why the film can’t be quite described as ‘fun,’ at least in the traditional sense,” wrote the Miami Herald’s Rene Rodriguez. “But Tarantino isn’t glorifying the ugliness; he’s condemning it.”
Six months after kicking off his Kill Bill revenge saga with Volume 1, Tarantino returned to theaters with its conclusion. Part kung fu brawl, part origin story, Kill Bill: Volume 2 fills in the blanks of its katana-wielding protagonist’s (Uma Thurman) past while she slices and dices her way to whatever passes for redemption. Clocking in at over four hours between the two installments, it’s a pretty hefty cinematic experience for something that boils down to a fairly simple tale, but most critics didn’t mind at all — in fact, Volume 2 performed nearly as well as its predecessor on the Tomatometer. As Jeremy Heilman of MovieMartyr argued, “The massive combination of the first and second Kill Bill movies stands as a testament to both Tarantino’s exceptional skill as a filmmaker and the possibilities of pop cinema.”
After a seemingly interminable six-year wait following Jackie Brown, Tarantino re-emerged with a blood-spattered martial arts epic so sprawling it needed to be chopped in half. Enter 2003’s Kill Bill: Volume 1, starring Uma Thurman as an assassin whose plans to leave the fold for a life of wedded bliss hit a snag when her mentor (David Carradine) decides he’d rather have her dead than retired, and sends her fellow killers-for-hire (played by Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, and Michael Madsen) to put a permanent stop to the nuptials. After watching Thurman’s take-no-prisoners performance, the New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris couldn’t help but say, “I would argue that, in a bizarre way, Mr. Tarantino empowers women as no action-genre director before him ever has.”
Three years after achieving “young Hollywood genius” status with Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino re-emerged with Jackie Brown, a 154-minute adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch that served as Tarantino’s homage to 1970s blaxploitation while resurrecting the career of one of the genre’s biggest stars: Pam Grier. Hitherto known for playing the title role in 1974’s Foxy Brown, Grier returned to the big screen in pretty good company, including Bridget Fonda, Robert Forster, Michael Keaton, Chris Tucker, Robert De Niro, and Pulp Fiction star Samuel L. Jackson. While it was ultimately a bit of a critical and commercial letdown after the raging success of Pulp Fiction, Jackie still proved a favorite for scribes like Chuck Rudolph of Matinee Magazine, who wrote that it “Achieves the soulful edge lacking from Tarantino’s previous efforts. Forster and Grier’s performances deserve to join the short-list of all-time greats.”
Having entered the realm of social justice revenge fantasy with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino basically remained there for Django Unchained, a pre-Civil War Western about a slave (Jamie Foxx) in an unorthodox partnership with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) who needs his assistance to apprehend of a trio of outlaws — and is willing to not only grant his freedom in exchange, but help Django find and free his wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of a sadistic plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). It’s the perfect setup for two hours and change of profane, gleefully violent action, and Tarantino more than delivers with a star-studded excoriation of systematic injustice that manages to treat its subject with something approaching the proper respect without sacrificing an ounce of momentum. The end result, wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern, is “Wildly extravagant, ferociously violent, ludicrously lurid and outrageously entertaining, yet also, remarkably, very much about the pernicious lunacy of racism and, yes, slavery’s singular horrors.”
Any film fan worth his or her salt has seen plenty of World War II movies, but Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds added a little something special to the mix — an eminently well-cast revenge fantasy, starring a motley crew of solid actors (including Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, and Michael Fassbender) as soldiers in a parallel reality where the evil of the Third Reich is met full force with an Allied squadron whose members are hungry for Nazi blood (and/or scalps). Boasting a uniquely cathartic flavor of Tarantino-brewed violence to go with its taut drama and dark wit, Basterds proved powerfully compelling for critics like Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek, who had to concede, “Quentin Tarantino seems to be hanging on to a lost world of moviemaking. He may be nuts. But he’s a nut who cares.”
Debuts don’t come much more auspicious than Reservoir Dogs. Yes, it’s a profane, blood-splattered heist flick — and goodness knows we have more than enough of those — but this one’s noteworthy for a number of things, including its hyper-literate script, its killer soundtrack, and a cast stuffed with tremendously talented character actors (including Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, and Michael Madsen). While it didn’t exactly set the world on fire during its small theatrical run, it did offer cineastes an early look at one of modern filmmaking’s most exciting, fully formed talents — and it definitely drew the notice of critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader, who wrote, “It’s unclear whether this macho thriller does anything to improve the state of the world or our understanding of it, but it certainly sets off enough rockets to hold and shake us for every one of its 99 minutes.”
Some careers take a while to get going — and then there’s Quentin Tarantino, who drew almost universal critical praise for Reservoir Dogs before skyrocketing into the Hollywood stratosphere with his second film, 1994’s Pulp Fiction. A $214 million box office smash and seven-time Academy Award nominee (as well as Best Original Screenplay winner), Fiction offered a blend of pop culture smarts, laugh-out-loud humor, and shocking violence so potent (and massively influential) that it even managed to revitalize John Travolta’s long-moribund acting career — and left Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” blasting out of countless college dorm rooms along the way. It was also, as Janet Maslin of the New York Times noted, “A triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino’s ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity and vibrant local color.”
(Photo by Getty Images / Frazer Harrison)
When Lost in the Sun hits theaters this week, fans will see a very different side of actor Josh Duhamel, best known for his starring TV roles on Battle Creek and Las Vegas. In his new film, Duhamel plays a drifter who enlists a teenage orphan to accompany him in his criminal ways along the open road. How very un-Tad Hamilton of him!
Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Duhamel to talk about his five favorite films — and also a very funny memory he has of his Star Wars toys!
I love it. I love the characters. I love the crazy psych ward. Jack Nicholson! I remember hearing about it when I was young and I was becoming more interested in film. Jack Nicholson had a run there in the ‘70s and ‘80s that was just unrivaled in my opinion. I’m a huge fan of his.
I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen Dumb and Dumber. It’s got to be at least 50. I remember in college, I watched this movie with my buddies and we just thought it was the funniest f—ing thing we’ve ever seen. I still watch it and I still quote it all the time. In fact, I [went] on Ellen as Lloyd Christmas for Halloween… You know what it is about it? There are so many moments in this movie that are ridiculous; they’re dumb — that’s why the movie is called Dumb and Dumber — but I’ve thought about this. Why is it that I love this movie so much? I think it’s because Lloyd and Harry really cared about each other. There was real heart to that movie… and if you don’t have that in these movies and it’s just pure broad comedy, it’s missing something that you can connect to.
I love The Shining. I love Stanley Kubrick. I love the tone of his movies. It was super-scary, and, again, I love Nicholson in it. I love the ominous nature of that giant hotel in the mountains.
That was in 1994. That was right around the time I was finishing college and moving to California, in that period of my life, and I was secretly interested in the entertainment business but didn’t tell anybody. There was something about the writing and the music and John Travolta’s resurgence. Sam Jackson was just a badass motherf—er. I love Tarantino’s writing.
It made a huge impression on me as a kid and I still have all my little action figures. In fact, my mom was too cheap to buy me the actual Star Wars case to hold them all in, so I have a case, but it’s called “Star World” and it has all these knock-off characters — like, there’s a Darth Vader who’s all in black, but just not quite the same. And there’s a hairy character who’s sort of like Chewbacca, but not — which is probably a collectors’ item when I think about it because they would never get away with that now. There’d be copyright infringements.
Rotten Tomatoes: You’re going to be really geeked-out about the new Star Wars, huh?
Oh, man. I already am. I’m super-pumped about it. I just showed my two-year-old son my collection of Star Wars figures the other day and he doesn’t know. They have zero regard for the preciousness of anything and the first thing he does is pick up my Lando Calrissian — and there are these little plastic capes that are in mint condition –and the first thing he does is pull it right off and tear it. And I’m like, “Nooooo! That thing’s been in tact since ‘77!”
Lost in the Sun hits theaters, VOD, and iTunes on Friday, Nov. 6.
(Photo by Andrew H. Walker / Staff / Getty Images)
He’s the son of the nicest guy in Hollywood, Tom Hanks, but Colin Hanks has carved out a distinctive niche of his own in the movie business. He made his debut in That Thing You Do! and broke out as a star in his own right in 2002’s Orange County. He’s worked steadily in film and television, including gigs on Roswell, The Good Guys, Dexter, and Fargo, and he can currently be seen on the sitcom Life In Pieces. After directing a documentary short last year, Hanks’ first documentary feature film, All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, opens this Friday. We spoke with Hanks about his Five Favorite Films and the allure of Tower Records.
Let’s start with The Big Lebowski. I remember seeing this film. I was studying in Germany at the time, and I remember loving Fargo so much — that was my first introduction to the Coen brothers — and I was so excited that they had a new movie out. So I went to some German cinema to go see The Big Lebowski. It was in English, but with German subtitles. I remember watching the movie and just being incredibly disappointed. I really did not like the movie. Probably about four years later, I rewatched it and I instantly said, “I’ve never been so wrong in my entire life.This is one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen.” It’s incredibly well-written, the characters are hilarious, the performances are so nuanced and so deep it’s almost mind-boggling. A lot of the times you do scenes and you just sort of come up with these happy accidents and it just seems like almost everything in there could not have been a happy accident; surely it must have been thought out. I just think it is such an original, fun film and it is quite honestly one of the most quotable films of the last fifty years in my opinion. I think there are so many quotes in there that I realized how foolish I was that first time. I think maybe I was just so excited that I was drinking a beer in a movie theater; maybe that’s why.
Pulp Fiction was a very big deal for me. That was the first film I remember seeing where I felt compelled to have a conversation afterwards with anyone who saw it. Prior to that, I was still a young kid; I was still in high school, and I would see movies and I would be like, “Oh that was great,” and move on. But that was one that stuck with me for so long; the performances and the dialogue were just so memorable. I just wanted to talk to whoever had seen it. I just felt like it was something you needed to talk about. And obviously that was a film that really changed the direction of film history for a great many people, myself included.
I really, genuinely don’t like favorite lists because you always leave stuff out. So there are a lot of important films I could put in like The Godfather Part II, perhaps, or The Godfather Part I, but I’m going to go with The Empire Strikes Back for number three only because it’s Empire Strikes Back! I don’t think I need to say why. It’s so good. It takes what arguably could be just a simple science fiction movie and really takes it to this other place that is just so engaging and so believable and dramatic as well. Not overly dramatic, but dramatic. I love that film a great deal.
Number four would be Dazed and Confused. That was the movie that you saw and you wished it were your life. [laughs] That was a movie that I would watch all the time. I had it on VHS and whenever I was lonely, I’d throw it on. Whenever I wished I was out and about with friends from school, I would just throw that on and felt like I knew [the characters]. That was just one of those films that I just related to at that time. It was incredibly important and it’s another quotable film. I love it.
The last film I’m going to list is a documentary about Red Hot Chili Peppers recording Blood Sugar Sex Magik that was called Funky Monks. It’s about an hour long, it’s shot in black and white, and it’s about them recording Blood Sugar Sex Magik in this house in Beverly Hills. Blood Sugar Sex Magik was arguably the most important album of my young adult life. It sort of put me on my musical path. I guess now, looking back on it, it’s not at all ironic that Funky Monks was the first documentary that I ever watched. It sort of set me on a documentary path, where it wasn’t just narrative movies that interested me, but also real-life stories told in documentary form were now available to me. It greatly influenced me, not only in the Tower Records documentary, but also in all the documentary work that I’ve done. It is, I find, an incredibly engaging film about a subject that I am very passionate about, which is that particular record, and that particular time, not only for that band, but for music in general.
Marya E. Gates for Rotten Tomatoes: What is it about Tower Records that moved you to make a documentary on the company?
Colin Hanks: I spent a lot of time at Tower Records. I bought the Red Hot Chili Peppers doc there. I bought albums there. It was very instrumental for me growing up. I didn’t have a sweet tooth, so I spent all my money at the record shop, not at the candy store. So Tower was one of those places where you could really discover yourself and decide who you wanted to be. I was able to do that at Tower Records, and although I have a deep connection to the store, there was a lot about it’s history that I didn’t know and I saw an opportunity here in which here’s this incredibly beloved company, that everyone sort of thinks they know what the history is, and chances are they don’t. Chances are, there’s a lot about its history that people are not aware of, that is not only engaging storytelling, but also the characters that worked at Tower, the people that shopped at Tower, the people that spent 30, 40 years of their life working at this company, they’re all incredibly engaging, fun people to speak with. I hope that when people see the film, they not only learn a little bit about a company that they thought they knew a lot about, but hopefully they realize that Tower closing its doors wasn’t just a big company, some faceless corporation, but it was actually people that had spent 30, 40 years of their lives getting to know each other, getting married, having kids, getting divorced, going through all of the big moments of their lives and then all having to fire each other, and how difficult that was. Hopefully it puts a little personal perspective onto a company that a lot of people have a great affinity for.
All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records opens this weekend in limited release.
Life in Pieces airs on CBS at 8:30/7:30c on Mondays.
