Mourning my favorite director

I debated about whether to hem and haw in the subject of this post about calling Rob Reiner my favorite director.

If you were measuring Reiner in terms of the yardsticks a cinephile would use to praise a director, you might not think of him as an obvious candidate for this honor. He wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks. He didn't have a signature style. His movies didn't make the Sight & Sound list. He wasn't a big mis-en-scene guy. 

But if measuring Reiner only on the pleasure his films brought me, it's no contest. 

I wouldn't maybe know I held Reiner in such high esteem except for Flickchart, which has revealed to me that I have three Rob Reiner movies in my top 30 of all time, and six in my top 200. Yes that's right, Reiner is responsible for 3% of my top 200 movies of all time. 

And today I learned he was stabbed to death, along with his wife, most likely by their son.

WTF?

I haven't even watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues yet. That is going to be one sorry viewing when it actually happens. 

There are lots of terrible things going on in the world. Two men fuelled by hatred just shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach. Another guy killed some Brown University students. And as it happens, I've got some pretty concerning health developments in my family right now. (Nothing in my immediate family of my wife and two sons. That's all I'll say.)

But because I'm a movie guy, the one I can't get out of my head is the image of Rob Reiner begging and pleading for his life when an assailant, most likely his son, was coming at him with a knife.

And losing that argument. 

Any death is bad. But when Rob Reiner's father, the great Carl Reiner, keeled over at age 98, you couldn't even really be sad. You knew it was his time. 

Rob Reiner was 78. He lived a good life. But it had such a terrible ending, and when I think of him, I will now always think of him in the same company as others who lost their lives in such devastating ways, like Phil Hartman. 

So while I want to give Reiner more of the typical, wistful send-off that I like to give our cinematic luminaries when they pass on to the great beyond, now I'm in such painful misery that I can't even type straight. 

But because I don't think I can write a series of pieces remembering Reiner, I'm going to give it a go now.

Rob Reiner became a target on shows like South Park for a sort of liberal piousness that Trey Parker and Matt Stone found grating. But for a liberal like me, that was part of why I liked Reiner. He believed in the causes I believed in. But that was just a happy bit of fortuitousness. I would have loved him even if he played on the other team. 

That's the thing about Reiner -- you could like the films he directed, but he also had a personality as a result of being an actor first and foremost. I can't say that I watched All in the Family -- in fact, it's possible I've never seen a single episode -- but Reiner's Meathead made millions into fans of his personality, a personality that earned him two Emmys. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing Reiner's persona. It was expansive. It was hilarious. In his comedy, it could be a bit naughty. On this weekend where we've lost some good and innocent Jewish Sydneysiders, Reiner embodied the lineage of great Jewish comedy, his kvetching always generous, his observations always shrewd. Simply put, he was funny as hell, and I also got a great sense of warmth from him. 

And the film that introduced him to the world as a director used that personality to good effect. My highest ranked Reiner film on Flickchart is his first, This Is Spinal Tap, my #9 film of all time. I said earlier that Reiner wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks, but how about new film genres? He and Tap star Christopher Guest might be the two men most responsible for the mockumentary, and we couldn't have gotten a better initial tour guide than Reiner's Marty DiBergi, who interviews David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. I can't believe I don't know what the first scene of this movie is, but if you told me it was DiBergi introducing himself to us, I'd say that's most likely right. Little did we know, Reiner was introducing us to his incorporable career, which gave him the best "imperial period" -- to borrow the music term -- of any director. What's more, it was his personality as the straight man playing off the Tap men that made it all work. Who else could have asked Nigel the innocent questions necessary for "This one goes to 11," and had it work so smashingly?

Reiner followed that up the very next year with The Sure Thing, which at #396 on my Flickchart is only my seventh favorite Reiner movie. I have friends for whom this might be top three. And it would be top three for me for many directors, but I have so many other films to talk about that I can't even linger on one of the films that really introduced us to John Cusack.

Stand by Me in 1986, #131 on my Flickchart, proved that we didn't know Reiner's only mode after two films. He could also make a Stephen King adaptation and a truly seminal coming-of-age story for Gen Xers -- though about their parents, so it worked for that generation too. Which also managed to be funny in spots. It had a huge impact on me. Heck, I was 12 when it came out. 

But then the very next year, again -- that's four movies in four years, if you're keeping track -- Reiner made my #11 favorite film of all time, The Princess Bride. Epic. Iconic. Also hilarious. You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions. I didn't even know how much I loved this until I rewatched it with my kids in the last decade, which is when it shot up from somewhere in my 20s or 30s on Flickchart all the way up to #11. If it weren't blocked by The Iron Giant, that would be two Reiner films in my top ten.

Rob Reiner didn't make a film in 1988. Everyone has to recharge sometimes.

But in 1989 he made what I consider to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time, and yes I know I am pissing off classic movie fans who'd rather Cary Grant star in their great romcoms than Billy Crystal. But what can I say, I was born in 1973, and When Harry Met Sally slayed me. It's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it makes me feel fonder about New York City than almost any film out there. For a long time this was ahead of The Princess Bride, fully in my top 20, but at the moment it's my #26 on Flickchart. 

And yet again Reiner made a movie in 1990, his second Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Which is also a stone-cold classic. Two-handers don't get more tense and exciting than this. He coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Kathy Bates that no one will soon forget, and brought James Caan back to relevance. Which is good enough for #150 on my Flickchart. 

Rob Reiner kept things going throughout the 1990s, with the exception of legendary flop North in 1994. (And even in a mode of excess generosity toward the man, no, I am not going to defend North.) I may not be as big a fan of A Few Good Men as some people (wow, I didn't realize it was all the way down at #3292), but I do respect it. The American President at #691 is more my style. Ghosts of Mississippi (#2125) is even pretty good.

But while many people are ready to write off Reiner's career at this point -- even with zeitgeisty movies like The Bucket List on his resume -- I am always left in a puddle of fresh tears over 1999's The Story of Us, which is all the way up to #167 on my Flickchart. This is possibly the only movie I can remember watching twice consecutively on the same day, just before my first son was born in 2010, for reasons I won't get into right now. I'm sure it's happened, but I don't remember when or why. Then I went another 15 years without seeing it again, when I saw it this past February, my fourth time overall, and it inspired me to write this post. And then five days later, this post. 

I'm going to finish talking about this movie not because I don't think Reiner has made a good movie in the 21st century, but because it makes a good bookend with This is Spinal Tap. Why, you ask? What could these two movies possibly have in common? 

Answer: Rob Reiner the actor. Rob Reiner the personality.

In the film, Reiner plays the best friend of Bruce Willis' character, who is possibly separating from his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Reiner is married to Rita Wilson. Just likeable actors all around. 

Reiner doesn't have a huge number of scenes, but he has just enough to give us the flavor we like from his personality. And the part I love most is Reiner's disquisition about how the ass does not really exist. The ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. In reality, there is no ass. Believe me, it works in context, especially when it gets called back to later on.

Reiner was great in front of the camera, Reiner was great behind the camera, and Reiner was great in the sphere of progressive politics, even if Matt and Trey sometimes didn't like it. I can't believe I won't see him in front of or behind the camera again.

Is he my favorite director? God, now I have to use the past tense. Was he my favorite director?

It's something I've told people about before, this high success rate on my Flickchart, which corresponds to my real affection for the man and his movies. But I always feel a bit hesitant about it. If you go around telling everyone how much you love Rob Reiner, maybe they just focus on the fact that he didn't have a lot of hits in the last 25 years of his career, or maybe they think of Matt and Trey making fun of him. Maybe it's an embarrassment to say, especially in circles of serious cinephiles, how much you love the output of one of our great populist directors.

But if I can't proudly shout my love for Rob Reiner now, in the hours after his death, I don't know when I can. 

I might just shout until I cry. 

The sacrificial sleuth

 
SPOILER WARNING: The following post freely discusses plot details from The Loved Ones, Misery and The Shining. If you haven't seen those movies and don't want elements of their plots spoiled, stop reading now.

After sitting on our disc from Netflix for about two weeks, my wife and I finally watched The Loved Ones this weekend. Since my wife's Australian and so is this movie, I figured it would be a slam dunk for her. Unfortunately, I made a bad assessment of what type of movie it was. This poster made me think it was a campy horror comedy, maybe a Mean Girls meets Shawn of the Dead kind of thing. A bunch of kids at the prom have to fight off zombies, or something like that.

Uh uh.

This movie is straight up torture porn. Okay, not really -- the term "torture porn" is usually employed negatively, suggesting a movie that exists only for the purpose of tapping into that reprehensible part of our id that wants to see all the ways a human being might be made to suffer. The Loved Ones has much more of a brain than that.

But it is shocking in all the ways that torture porn is shocking, and that's what made me regret showing it to my wife, who would probably have preferred cinematic comfort food when she was sick, rather than seeing knives hammered into feet and power drills entering skulls.

What I really want to talk about related to The Loved Ones, however, is a cinematic trope it made me aware of, which I'm labeling "the sacrificial sleuth."

Since you bypassed the spoiler warning and presumably have seen this movie, you know that Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy, pictured in the poster) and her father (John Brumpton) have a hobby of kidnapping beautiful teenage boys, torturing them and then lobotomizing them. They store these lobotomized creatures in a dungeon under the floor boards of their living room. The film's protagonist, Brent (Xavier Samuel), manages to interrupt the process on the verge of his own lobotomy, and a chain of events leads to him being pushed into this dungeon, where the lobotomized creatures intend to make him their next meal. He wards off that threat (rather too easily, if you ask me), but he's still trapped down there.

Fortunately for him, there's a sleuth on his trail. The father of his best friend's prom date (Andrew S. Gilbert) is a police officer, and has pieced together enough clues to determine that Lola may have been responsible for kidnapping Brent. The police officer (Paul by name) drives to Lola's house, sees a bunch of blood on the floor, and breaks in with his gun drawn.

When I saw what was happening next, I was overcome by a sense of deja vu.

As the trap door to the dungeon has been left open following Lola and Brent's most recent skirmish, Paul is naturally drawn to the edge of the opening. He's barely had time to register a bloodied Brent standing among zombie corpses before he gets a cleaver to the head, falls in and takes his place among the bodies. Meaning Brent will have to find another (rather convenient and frankly improbable) way of escaping.

I've seen this kind of red herring savior before.

The first example that occurred to me was Rob Reiner's Misery. For much of the movie's running time, we see Richard Farnsworth's local sheriff (Buster by name) slowly and steadily investigating the disappearance of novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan). He's doing it almost as a hobby, going on hunches and a sense that something isn't right, where we're led to believe that a lesser investigative mind would just assume (as most people do) that Paul is dead. Buster's sleuthing eventually leads him to the house of Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), which is indeed where Paul is being held captive. As in The Loved Ones, Buster has only seconds to realize that he has, indeed, found Paul, before Annie shoots him in the back, killing him. 

But as I thought about it more, I thought of another example, also from the work of Stephen King. For the whole of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, we follow Scatman Crothers' Dick Hallorann during his winter-time retreat to Florida. (In fact, Filmspotting recently revisited The Shining, and the hosts noted just how much we check in with Dick, down to the minute details of his life that don't seem to be important.) Because Dick and Danny Torrance share "the shining," Dick steadily becomes aware that things are not going well back at the Overlook Hotel. Thus begins Dick's long trek back to the hotel -- another journey that is covered in minute detail. He arrives just in time to get an axe in the lower back.

It made me wonder how many other times in movies (or stories in general) we see this trope -- the secondary character who comes to save the day, only to die instantly.

The reasons for the near-immediate death of this character are sort of obvious. He can't save the hero, because the hero has to find his own way out of the mess he's in. The hero is the hero precisely because he summons a kind of inhuman ingenuity to save himself from a seemingly impossible situation.

So then why have this secondary character at all?

My guess is that the audience needs a red herring savior, needs this sense of a possible outside force who will arrive to save the day when it seems unlikely that the hero will be able to do it himself. Since Paul Sheldon has two destroyed ankles and a total lack of mobility, there's no way he's going to be able to overcome Annie Wilkes and crawl through a snowy Rocky Mountain winter to safety, right? So we need to feel like Sheriff Buster is going to put together the clues to rescue Paul. We need to feel the hope that Paul himself does not feel.

When this sleuth is sacrificed, it creates an even greater crisis for the hero. How will he escape now? And so he must be the master of his own destiny. He must find the strength to make a daring play that should never work, but does, because he's used his intellect to outsmart the villain in the end.

While the resolutions to The Loved Ones and Misery are far more similar, including the gender dynamic between the torturer and the tortured (and the fact that there are people being tortured in both films to begin with), The Shining differs a bit from those two. Dick Hallorann isn't really a detective putting together clues, and the hero is Danny, the boy, who only passively kills his father by continue to run away from him. But the dynamic of the outsider arriving to save the day, only to be cut down immediately, is the same in all three.

Can you think of other films that use this same trope? I'd love to hear about it. And let's just hope I've seen the movie you're mentioning, so you don't have to give me a spoiler warning. 

A realization about Rob Reiner

My friend Don, who was visiting for the weekend from Chicago, and I were leaving Amoeba Music in Hollywood on Sunday night when the conversation turned to Rob Reiner. It had actually started on Ron Howard, because I had just picked up a nice-looking (albeit used) collector's edition DVD of Apollo 13 for $5.99. (It was a space-themed evening -- I also finally bought Dean Parisot's Galaxy Quest.) For his part, Don bought Bram Stoker's Dracula on BluRay and some music.

The apparent similarities between Howard and Reiner -- both former TV stars who had gone on to careers as highly respected directors -- was what caused us to wander into Reiner territory. Our initial thesis was that Howard might be the greater director. After all, he'd won an Oscar, and he continues to release prestige films. Whereas Reiner's last decade has been kind of the opposite, composed of moderate misfires (Rumor Has It ...), major misfires (Alex & Emma) and popular schlock (The Bucket List).

But it was when we started to review Reiner's older work that it hit us like a smack in the forehead:

Rob Reiner may have had the greatest decade for any director of any era. And he did most of it in five years.

If you start with his directorial debut in 1984 -- This Is Spinal Tap, which could be one of the best first movies ever -- and go forward, Reiner was absolutely on fire for the next five to ten years. Not only that, but every movie he made could be described as one of the best versions of that movie ever made -- even still today.

Shall we take a look?

This Is Spinal Tap (1984) might be the best mockumentary ever made.

Argument: Hardcore film lovers may cite a dozen examples to the contrary, but you could even say that Rob Reiner invented the mockumentary. What's certainly true is that Christopher Guest's participation in this film inspired him to reshape his whole career as a series of increasingly less brilliant mockumentaries. Nothing is less than 100% brilliant in This Is Spinal Tap. In fact, it's so great that I don't need to go into an in-depth description of why it's so great, because you already know. But I will mention Don's interesting perspective on its greatness, which is that you can see the characters thinking. When Nigel Tufnel (Guest) makes one of his inane comments, he's not just reading his lines (in part because a bunch of this stuff was improvised). You can actually see the wheels turning in his head as he answers each question, and that's part of what makes it such a fully realized, spot-on satire.

The Sure Thing (1985) might be the best road movie ever made.

Argument: Or it might not. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't. But the rest of the movies after this fit the format, so go with me on this. The Sure Thing is definitely a really good road movie, and as a result of the age I was when I saw it (about 13 or 14), it sticks out to me as one of the first films I think of when you talk about road movies. It's full of classic scenes involving the various modes of transport John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga use to cross the country, like Cusack freaking out the pervert who picks up Zuniga hitchhiking, and Cusack clashing with the pair of show-tune singers (one of whom is Tim Robbins). It's especially nice as it had the function of serving as Cusack's breakout role.

Stand by Me (1986) might be the best coming-of-age movie ever made.

Argument: Who in my generation doesn't think of Stand by Me when they think of coming-of-age movies? I'd like to think that this extends outward to other generations, but I'd probably be wrong about that. After all, today's teens probably see Twilight as a coming-of-age movie. But in terms of purity of form, Stand by Me takes the cake. Few films deal so intensely with the transition between childhood and adulthood, as Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern are caught between the innocence of childhood play and the seriousness of death, which confronts them in the form of a corpse, older bullies who fight with knives, and a train that may flatten them like pancakes. It might also be one of the best period pieces ever made, with its great 50s soundtrack.

The Princess Bride (1987) might be the best storybook romance ever made.

Argument: Or should it be called a romantic fantasy? A fantasy comedy? A romantic storybook comedy? However you choose to categorize it, The Princess Bride hits every note perfectly. It introduced a slew of iconic characters, a boatload of quotable lines, and one of the most delightful forms of "damsel in distress" escapism you are likely to find on film. Do you remember how you felt after you first saw The Princess Bride? There you go. I'll leave it at that because there just isn't much more to say.

When Harry Met Sally ... (1989) might be the best romantic comedy ever made.

Argument: And here is the really big one. All the other genres I've discussed have relatively few entries compared to the number of movies that could be described as romantic comedies. And yet this movie could still be considered the best romantic comedy of all time -- I'm not even sure what the other top contenders would be, since there are few romantic comedies that everyone can agree are as perfect as this. Granted, this is again showing the bias of the era in which I came of age, which may be inescapable -- there are certainly classic romantic comedies by the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy that older viewers would probably consider their favorites. But When Harry Met Sally is almost certainly the king of modern romantic comedies, and you might even say its stamp is evident on many if not most of the romantic comedies that followed. Again, I don't need to tell you why.

Misery (1990) might be the best Stephen King adaptation ever made.

Argument: Okay, now I know I'm wrong -- especially since Reiner himself has made a better Stephen King adaptation (Stand by Me). However, the best film adaptations of King's novels tend to be either non-horrors (both Stand by Me and one of my favorite films of all time, The Shawshank Redemption) or horror adaptations in which the writer or director took liberties with King's work (The Shining). But could Misery be the best faithful adaptation of a horror by Stephen King? Perhaps.

A Few Good Men (1992) might be the best movie in which Jack Nicholson shouts "You can't handle the truth!" ever made.

Argument: Okay, now I'm kidding.

But this is a good place to leave off, because Reiner's next film was the infamous bomb North. He did follow that with the excellent The American President (best movie ever about the president? Nah) and the pretty-good Ghosts of Mississippi, but that's the last time Reiner has met with pretty much universal critical acclaim. (I absolutely love The Story of Us, but I know I'm in the minority.)

What's amazing about this period of 1984 to 1990 is not only how prolific he was during it, and not only how successful each film was, but how comfortably he shifted between genres. As is evident in the way I've structured this piece, talking about genres, Reiner never repeated himself during this period -- in fact, I don't know that you could say any two of the films are even somewhat similar to each other.

It's an interesting realization especially when compared and contrasted to yesterday's discussion of Danny Boyle, who is also constantly reinventing himself. If you lined up 20 film bloggers and asked them which one is the better director, Boyle or Reiner, you'd probably get 18 for Boyle and two for Reiner.

But I might be one of the two. I mean, just look at those titles. Granted, Reiner's films from the 1980s have had more of a chance to endure in the zeitgeist and stake their claims as classics, and his films are all accessible in a way that Boyle's films aren't even trying to be. But it's being uncharitable and just plain wrong to dismiss Reiner as simply a populist director. Making films for the masses that are also as smart as Reiner's films is a true challenge indeed. In a way, you could say that "anyone" can make an arsty film with a potentially narrow target audience -- and Boyle may be among the best at that, considering that his artistically credible films have also managed to find a pretty big audience. But making films that please both the studios and almost any film fans you ask, from the least discriminating to the most? That's a special talent. Because most of the time you are going to piss off serious fans by pandering to the masses. However, I don't think there are many serious film fans who would find fault with This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally or Misery. And This Is Spinal Tap, in its own way, might be more subversive than anything even Boyle has ever made.

I just think it's important not to let a "what have you done for me lately?" mentality cause us to forget or discount the kind of greatness that Rob Reiner demonstrated during those incredible 6+ years. Any director would be proud to have six titles as good as those on his CV. I'm not even sure if the best six films of Steven Spielberg of Martin Scorsese are as universally well-liked as those six films. Of course, I could also be getting carried away.

However, I think Reiner deserves a little excess enthusiasm. In recent years, the man has turned into something of a figure of ridicule, and not just because he's been on a losing streak in the director's chair. His most prominent recent appearance in pop culture may have been on South Park, where Trey Parker and Matt Stone eviscerated him, making him out to be a self-righteous liberal ideologue stuffing his face with food in every shot.

Well, that self-righteous liberal ideologue stuffing his face with food may just be one of the most influential directors of all time.

Or at the very least, a guy with an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.