Joel Schumacher's five best films

It took me until three days later to learn of the death of Joel Schumacher. I must have been hiding in my COVID hole even more than usual this week.

Schumacher was known as one of cinema's great punching bags, a hack who was an easy go-to any time you were looking for someone quick to dump on. He was also known as a bit of a dandy, as he was openly gay for the majority of his career, which seems quite courageous and did nothing to impede his upward mobility. (The claim that he had slept with 20,000 men sounds as absurd as when Wilt Chamberlain said the same thing about women. If true, it's a miracle that he died of cancer rather than AIDS.)

And yeah, he made his share of turds. But making your share of turds is something that happens when you average .76 films per year over a feature directing career that lasted exactly 30 years (1981 to 2011). The man liked to work, and if all his choices didn't land critically, he didn't care. He just moved on to the next one.

I probably did my share of dumping on Joel Schumacher over the years; every critic did. I mean, he did direct Batman & Robin. But I had a soft spot for the guy, as he also made a handful of films I liked more than most other people did. Today I want to talk about my five favorite.

5. The Lost Boys (1987) - As this is probably Schumacher's most beloved film and I'm trying to highlight his films that were underappreciated, this makes for a good entry to start with at #5. Besides, I've actually only seen The Lost Boys once, even though it is a childhood favorite for people in my age group. I'm sure this film would feel quite dated if I cued it up today, but at the time, I remember The Lost Boys having a real sense of atmosphere and danger. (I also liked the song "Cry Little Sister," which I found haunting in a teen-angsty type of way.) It was Twilight two decades before Twilight, only good.

4. The Phantom of the Opera (2004) - I remember this movie did not do well and was generally dismissed by critics and audiences alike, but I had quite a different experience with it. I really admired the art direction, and considered it dramatically potent to boot. Emmy Rossum was perfectly ethereal in the Christine role, and fun fact: Did you remember that this is where most of the world -- those who saw it, anyway -- was first introduced to Gerard Butler? I'm sure an affection for Andrew Lloyd Weber's original show had something to do with my appreciation, but I'm hardly the only person in the audience who could make that claim, and I liked it more than they did.

3. Falling Down (1993) - Another film that was generally rejected that really struck a chord with me. And no, that wasn't for the reasons it got discussed in the media at the time, as an encapsulation of the rage of the white male who feels like he's losing his country to women and immigrants. No, I actually
wrote an extended piece in a film class about this movie, which I believe likened Michael Douglas' main character (known only by his license plate number, DFENS) to Frankenstein's monster. It was a film class on German Expressionism. I probably couldn't rehash my argument at all now, but the themes I identified spoke to me at that time.

2. Flatliners (1990) - That mood I mentioned in The Lost Boys? It's in Flatliners too. (As is Kiefer Sutherland -- maybe he's the common ingredient.) I think there's something to the idea that Schumacher had a way of engaging with young people's nascent grappling with death, or maybe just this young person, as I would have been 16 at the time I saw this. I remember being specifically haunted by the character of Julia Roberts' father, who killed himself. This movie was in my wheelhouse when I saw it and I was disappointed (though not surprised) that the remake, which I saw earlier this year, couldn't accomplish anything like what Schumacher did the first time around.

1. A Time to Kill (1996) - And Kiefer Sutherland makes his third appearance on this list. I can't really tell you why A Time to Kill lodged itself in my brain and wouldn't shake free -- seeing it with a girlfriend I was head over heels for could have had something to do with it -- but I can tell you that I ranked it tenth out of the films I saw in 1996. Schumacher was known for identifying young male actors with bright futures ahead of them (natch) and so it was with this film, which gave us Matthew McConaughey. I'm sure this film is way too overwrought and overheated for its own good, but something about it really clicked for me, and I always remember the performance McConaughey gives when he's doubled over with emotion in his climactic summation.

Rest in peace, Joel. You weren't always great, but you were a constant during three decades of important cinematic maturation for me, and for that I thank you.

Saving Hoyts Kiosk, four rentals at a time

They’re building a new Woolworth’s supermarket down the street from us, which my wife and I both consider a very exciting development. In fact, part of the reason we’re dragging our feet on moving, something we think it might be prudent for us to do, is because we don’t want to move out of our neighborhood before it gets its Woolies. It’s supposed to open in mid-2018, which is soon soon soon.

We’re both excited about the easy access to our preferred grocery store, but for a while I’ve been secretly excited about something else I thought might accompany this new store: a Hoyts kiosk.

You see, when I first came to Australia, most of the Hoyts kiosks resided in Woolworth’s. Back then, I could still get new release rentals from a couple video stores, but those video stores closed a good three years ago. Now, these telephone booth-sized repositories are about the only remaining way to rent physical media.

Soon, there will be none. Instead of hoping that my new Woolies might get a Hoyts kiosk, now I’m reconciling myself to the fact that there may not even be a Hoyts kiosk business model by mid-2018.

The signs of impending doom have been there for a while. First they closed the newest one they’d opened, at an IGA that was conveniently on my ride home from work, near my son’s school. Then they closed the one at the IGA that’s near my work, which I used to ride out to at lunch.

But the real harbinger of the apocalypse came when they closed all the kiosks in the central business district. I mean, all of them. I used to frequent ones at the Queen Victoria Center or the Melbourne Central Shopping Center, the latter of which actually had two in its heyday. But when I went a few weekends back to let the kids pick up a movie, as a way to get them to cooperate with the several errands we had to run (and so I could pick up something for myself without them hassling me), the one in the QV Center was gone. Poof. A few days later, I was at Melbourne Central and noted that one had vanished too. When I searched online for the closest to the postal code for my work, I found them only in suburbs whose names were only vaguely familiar to me. I mean, they were all within a reasonable distance, in terms of kilometers, but none of them represented realistic options for me.

Except one. There’s still one at the Woolworth’s in Moonee Ponds, which is a ten-minute drive from my house.

So that’s where I went on Saturday, renting a whopping four titles for the weekend viewing binge just completed: The Book of Henry, 47 Meters Down, The Beguiled and Wind River. I’d have rented more if there were more I’d wanted. (I opted to pass on Flatliners, though it does make a good if unfortunate thematic accompaniment to this post.)

Rent ‘em Saturday morning in time to get them back by Sunday night. Perfect.

Yeah, that was $16 worth of rentals, but on iTunes it would have cost me more than $20. A disturbing number of the movies I want to rent from iTunes are $4.99 and even $5.99, and though I’d have to rent some that way, I didn’t want it to be all.

My first instinct was to figure out if the most number of movies I’ve ever rented at one time from a kiosk would entitle me to some kind of bulk discount. It had been a long time since I’d gotten one of those emails from Hoyts, telling me I could rent one and get one free – or more likely, rent three and get the fourth free. Something that usually wouldn’t be practical for me, but would be in this case. I even went to the website to look for deals. The last one they offered was a three for $9 deal in September. I could practically see the tumbleweeds rolling through the promotions sections on the site.

Then of course it occurred to me that the point was not to see what I could get from Hoyts for the minimum financial output. The point was to try to keep Hoyts in business. So in the end, I gave them my $15.96 with a smile.

The smile faltered pretty quickly though. These kiosks are already a relic, and soon they’re going to vanish entirely. In terms of my sentimental love of the video store, they’re a poor facsimile to begin with, but even this poor facsimile soon will be gone. And my $15.96 is not going to postpone this inevitability by even a minute.

It heartened me some to see that when I first got there, there was a couple puzzling over what they were going to rent, then another woman coming up and rubbernecking to see when it would be her turn. This small traffic jam at the kiosk, which ordinarily would have annoyed me and instantly made me impatient, instead felt like a positive sign. I did about $30 worth of shopping and returned to find it open for me to use.

But I’m kidding myself. The Hoyts kiosk is in its death throes. Few people are willing to put up with going to great lengths to rent a movie one day and return it to a specific location – albeit one of any number of (increasingly fewer) specific locations – by 9 p.m. the next day. For not much more on iTunes, you get your movie instantly, and if you don’t start watching it that day, no big deal. You have 30 days to start watching it. And once you start watching it, you have 48 hours to finish. Even stretching it, the most hours you can get out of a Hoyts rental is about 36.

The upcoming loss is symbolic more than practical. Practically speaking, iTunes always wins, in everything except the money – and even then, you have to factor in the extra time and petrol (gas) it took me to make round trips to this Woolies on consecutive days. Since I keep relatively little free space on my hard drive, downloading rentals from iTunes has always had a cap on it in terms of my capacity, but recently even this is no longer a problem. I only recently started noticing, perhaps because it only recently became available, that you don’t actually have to download your rentals anymore unless it’s convenient for you to do so. You can just stream them. Which I did this weekend with The Trip to Spain and Columbus, easily and without any drama.

So Hoyts will lose, in the long run, but maybe it will go longer than I think. Maybe the reason Hoyts is no longer operating in areas of high transit, like those locations in our central business district, is because it isn’t really practical for people to get to those locations both to pick up and return movies. Though maybe it would be practical just to serve a small neighborhood, where people can rent and return by foot. It’s keeping the Moonee Ponds kiosk in business – for now. Could my neighborhood be that kind of neighborhood?

I said up at the top that I’m trying to save the Hoyts kiosk by giving them my money at this crucial juncture in their existence. But I’m fooling myself. I could only rent those four movies because my family was out of town and I was watching during the daytime. And once my 2017 list closes, in just eight days, I’ll go into a period of not caring much about new releases on video. In fact, I typically don’t start renting again from the Hoyts kiosk until the first 2018 movies start coming out on DVD, usually sometime in May.

If there is still a Hoyts kiosk to rent from in May.