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. 

Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here. 

Love Story

The last movie I watched twice in the same day was The Story of Us.

Then I didn't watch it again for nearly 15 years.

It was August 22, 2010, just three days before the birth of my first son -- though we didn't know he was going to be a son at the time, and we didn't know he would be the first of an eventual two. I can't remember why I chose to watch it that Sunday afternoon, but the emotional pregnancy of our actual pregnancy made me perfectly primed to receive all its wisdom about marriage and parenting. In fact, so primed that when I came to the end of it, and my wife walked into the room, I told her how much it had affected me, and we started watching it again.

It was not my first time seeing the movie. I'd watched it once and reviewed it (positively) when it first came out. Actually, it was one of the retroactive reviews I did for AllMovie, since I wasn't yet reviewing for them on its actual release date. But there were a lot of gaps to fill in their database when I started writing for them in 2000, a year after The Story of Us came out, and I did a lot of gap filling.

It hadn't impacted me as much the first time, perhaps because I was yet another ten years earlier in my life and I wasn't even dating anyone seriously, let alone contemplating marriage or children as an immediate prospect. It walloped me, though, in 2010.

If I didn't watch it again in the 15 years since, it isn't because I doubted my impression of the movie formed on that day. Maybe it was for the same reason I chose these movies for watching when my wife was out of town, as she was last night when I watched The Story of Us for the first time since. If you don't want your wife to think you're unhappy in your marriage, you best not randomly rewatch a movie about marital troubles when she's walking through the living room and forming her own thoughts about why you may have chosen this time to watch this movie.

But watching this movie on Valentine's Day eve was appropriate because this is, first and foremost, a love story, and a terrifically moving one at that. And you can imagine how now having been married for 17 years, and a father for nearly 15 of those, gives me so much fuller an appreciate of this love story, as well as the pain and difficulty that threatens to unravel it. 

And if possible, I loved this movie even more this time, and am now contemplating intentionally dueling it on Flickchart -- as in, selecting the title for a purposeful re-ranking -- so it lands in my top 100 movies of all time.

That's a funny thing to admit about a movie that basically no one thinks was very good. I'm not sure why The Story of Us was coldly received and remains a sort of forgotten movie in Rob Reiner's filmography, which is as impressive as anyone's for a ten-year-stretch from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. And I might actually like The Story of Us more than all but a few of those films.

Since you are undoubtedly in the "I don't agree with what you're saying or I didn't see the movie" crowd, I'm not sure this post is for you, or if you'll appreciate most of the things I'm about to say about this movie, some of which I said in a post that went up on the actual day my son was born (which you you can find here). Maybe it's only for me, but then again, most blogging has to only be for yourself because no one else is going to care about this stuff as much as you do.

I again noticed the details of this movie as I was watching it last night, and just started to jot down notes on my phone. Instead of organizing my thoughts into a coherent piece, I think I will just list a bunch of things I love about this movie. But first, let me just give you the basic story. And instead of rewriting, I think I'll just copy what I wrote back in 2010:

The movie was referred to sarcastically at the time as When Harry Broke Up With Sally. It stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple married for 15 years, who are taking advantage of having their son and daughter away at camp for the summer, to try out a separation that may ultimately lead to divorce. The movie begins a few days before the kids leave for camp, and ends when they return. In between, Ben and Katie Jordan do their best to live their lives apart, with the inevitable moments together -- some of which are positive, some of which remind them why they're no longer suited to be together. The movie progresses along during their present tense of that summer, but it also flashes back to the memories they're cataloguing of 15 years of marriage. These memories are triggered by conversations they have with their friends (a well-cast group of Reiner, Rita Wilson, Paul Reiser and Julie Hagerty), as well as mundane things that happen in everyday life.

I went on to write a lot of other things that I could probably repeat in some form here, but I've already linked to the post, so you can read it if you want. But just let me get to the notes I jotted down, reasons I love The Story of Us and reasons you should see it if you haven't -- even on Valentine's Day.

- In a story that contains a number of very short flashbacks to when these two were much younger and not yet married, there's one scene that plays out in full that I love for how it establishes these characters. Katie is an intern typing away on an old typewriter in the office where Ben works as a TV writer, and he's trying to get her attention by throwing small office supplies at her -- nothing that will hurt her, of course, like paper clips and the like. She pretends she does not notice. Finally you would think she can't help but acknowledge what's going on when he tosses a shower of maybe a dozen paper clips. She does respond to this, but she does it by going to the other room and coming back wearing a pith helmet with a rotating police siren on top of it. She returns to her typing as if nothing had happened ... only a few moments later finally making eye contact with Ben and smiling broadly. What a playful way to establish the basic parameters of their dynamic ... as well as establishing some of the ways she has changed and he has not, potentially both to their detriment.

- I said in my previous post that I love the details of this movie, the details it does not need to spend the time to get right but does anyway. One I noticed last night is when Ben and Katie, not having told their kids their situation, visit them at camp on parents' weekend and are staying in their usual cabin, with Ben planning to sleep on the couch. Ben is wearing a Camp Pinewood t-shirt, which you would think he might have just bought that day as a showing of additional financial support for the camp. However, if you look closer, you can see that there is a hole in the collar, indicating that not only was this bought some other year, maybe even three or four years ago, but that Ben is the type of guy who wears the camp t-shirt to the camp he's visiting. These details seem accidental but someone actually had to think about them, which is one of the things that gives The Story of Us its feeling of bracing authenticity.

- And speaking of this cabin, Willis has a great line delivery when his daughter asks if they are staying in the "acorn cabin," because an emotional Ben has just started crying when he saw them and is now trying desperately to cover that up. The rest of his family is walking toward the dining hall and he shouts after them "Yes! We got the acorn cabin!" It's hilarious, even though I am not conveying it very well. 

- I love Paul Reiser's rant about why Ben can't write a book about his grandmother. Reiser plays Ben's agent, and the first thing he asks Ben is if his grandmother fucked a president. When Ben doesn't seem to understand that his grandmother is too insignificant of a figure for a book that has any hope of selling copies, Reiser takes him to the window of his office building to look out at the people below, and goes into a long diatribe about how all the people below will some day die. He discusses all the things they spend their time doing, working his way up over the course of a minute of ranting to the idea that none of them wants to read a book about his fucking grandmother. It's great writing and really funny. 

- In one of the longer flashbacks to just, I believe it was, the previous year, Ben and Katie take a trip to Italy to try to jumpstart their marriage. Which works, until they return home ... and all the familiar problems immediately resurface. But in Italy, they meet an annoying other couple of Americans, and Ben instinctively recognizes that he wants to give them a false name because he doesn't want anything to do with them -- even though the others will probably immediately see that it is a false name. He says "We're the Mansons," and without a pause she chimes in with "From Spahn Ranch." Now, you could say this is just screenwriters being too clever. I prefer to think of it as them being on the same wavelength to such an extent that they immediately grok what the other is doing and have a witty retort at the ready -- which makes sense because they are both great linguists, he a writer and she a designer of crossword puzzles. This is borne out in the next scene when they are playing a game of hangman in plain sight under the table while sitting with this annoying couple.

- The boy their daughter has a crush on at camp is named twice, and the second time I was sure I caught it correctly: Austin Butler. I just think that's funny because we now have an Austin Butler of our own.

- Reiner is great with scenes shot in public locations, specifically restaurants. We all know about his famous scene in When Harry Met Sally ("I'll have what she's having"), but there's a good one here too -- not because I think the rant Ben gives here is the strongest part of the movie by any stretch. In fact, it might be the only part of the movie that made me cringe a bit. What I really love is the reactions of the other diners to his rant, which is that they start looking over and theorizing among themselves about what's going on. A good director is aware of what's going on in the scene, even with the extras, and there's no doubt that Reiner is a good director.

- There's one concept in this movie that I have the occasion to think about regularly in my life. If I said I thought about it once a month, that might not be an exaggeration. It's the idea, put forth by the character played by Reiner, that the ass is an illusion. Really, there is no ass; what we call the ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. Not only is this an interesting metaphor for the illusions that are part of every marriage -- the ones we bring in, and the ones that change over time -- but it's also just a damn funny idea. What's more, it has a great callback in Ben's otherwise a bit over-the-top restaurant rant. 

- Eric Clapton wrote the song "Get Lost" for this movie, and little bits of it play throughout in a wonderful way of setting the tone and tying it all together. It's not that I know this song particularly well from my daily life, but it's used so effectively and feels so -- preexisting? -- that I had trouble believing it was actually written for the film.

- And oh yeah, it packs all this into only 95 minutes. 

That's all I wrote down, but I could go on. I won't, of course. Like the people in Paul Reiser's rant, you too will someday die and maybe today you don't want to read much more about The Story of Us. 

I will, however, leave you with three concluding thoughts, as I wait for my wife to return for Valentine's Day tonight, with a slightly fuller understanding of how I could be a better husband and partner from having watched this movie. 

1) I was reduced to tears at the end of this movie. Again. The final speech by Michelle Pfeiffer is just so great that I might have to write a separate post about it at some point. It's actually one of two moments in the last ten minutes that get to me this way, both of which got me again. In fact, just in preparing for these moments, I felt myself starting to get choked up at other, smaller moments. 

2) Part of the fuller sense of emotion I felt while watching this movie likely had to do with the reminder of what Bruce Willis was once capable of. I'm sorry that he will never be able to give this sort of performance again.

3) The title of this post is obviously a play on the title of the movie and as a real encapsulation of what this movie ultimately is, which is why again, I encourage you to watch it as a sort of counterintuitive Valentine's Day movie. But it has another meaning as well. If you add in the words "I" and "The" and "of Us" to my title, you'd get "I love The Story of Us," which is also true. And I won't hide this love just because others have not yet discovered it.

A sad explanation for Bruce Willis' choices

Two 1990s action icons may have seen their careers end this week -- one by his own stupid actions, and one by something far less within his control. 

Bruce Willis had taken on the aspect of a laughingstock in recent years, a man so indiscriminate in his choices that he might have appeared in a teenager's first backyard movie if there were a couple thousand dollars in it for him.

But aphasia is no joke, and now we may never see Willis in a movie again. 

It was announced this week that the actor has been diagnosed with a form of brain damage that prevents its victim from being able to formulate or comprehend language. Presumably, that includes the speaking of lines of movie dialogue, and the ability to react to other people's lines of dialogue.

It means he's retiring from the business.

It's a sad day. 

Sadder: Apparently he was really being taken advantage of on set. It was clear he didn't know what was going on, couldn't remember his lines, etc. But they just kept on rolling him out there, making money off him. One might argue they did it to make Willis himself enough money so that he would be set once he could no longer work, but I'm skeptical. 

I can't remember where Willis stands in our good graces outside of the bad movies he's been appearing in, whether he's on the correct side politically (I remember some possible Republican leanings) or whether he's a good guy personally (I remember Kevin Smith hated him on Cop Out). I suspect the undeniable charm and charisma he once displayed had long since curdled into something far more toxic. I could look it up, but today is not the day to do so. 

At the height of his powers, though, what a movie star.

I won't go on at length about him as I might in an "in memoriam" piece -- he isn't dead -- but I did think it would be nice to highlight the top five times Willis' star wattage made a huge difference in a movie. That doesn't mean only that a "big name" was needed for the role, or that being a star was what made his performance in it memorable. I could have just called this "top five Bruce Willis roles" but I don't think that's exactly what I mean either. Maybe it is, you be the judge. 

Anyway, here is the list. 

5. Looper (2012) - This was sort of a comeback for Willis as it followed a long fallow period for the actor -- fallow as in not fruitful, though still as busy as ever. Especially paired with Rian Johnson's heady and intriguing concept, it reenergized our relationship with Willis, and Willis did his part to vanquish the accusations that he cared less and complained more. (I suppose he may have complained behind the scenes, but I didn't hear about it.) It's an interesting role in the sense that there is something sinister about it -- there's a moment of very poor judgment that leads to him committing a truly horrific action -- but it all comes from a place of sorrow, informed by all this foreknowledge of his preordained fate, and the loss of a loved one. Anyway, the performance really works for the film.

4. Twelve Monkeys (1996) - Willis really works well with heady subject matter involving time travel, doesn't he? He really communicates the disorientation his character finds himself in in Terry Gilliam's film, which involves trips through war zones, both actual (World War I) and metaphorical (an insane asylum). It's also a performance that eschews vanity, as he's broken and beaten up and sometimes without any clothes. Especially against a performance by Brad Pitt that's characterized by all its tics, you can appreciate how Willis underplays this material, and you really get a sense of his chemistry with Madeleine Stowe.

3. The Sixth Sense (1999) - This was not the first "unexpected" usage of Bruce Willis but it continues his ability to pair up with directors with a certain vision. Willis' work with M. Night Shyamalan was truly of the internal variety -- particularly in their follow-up collaboration, Unbreakable -- and Willis played that perfectly in setting up one of the biggest surprise twists in recent film history. (From which Shyamalan himself may have never fully recovered, artistically, as it set him off on the path that has caused us all to laugh at him so much.) This was one of the first times I remember feeling real pathos for a Willis character, which was present in other of his films but overshadowed by a more dominant tone, such as confidence or wise-cracking.

2. Pulp Fiction (1994) - Less than a decade after he even came on the radar for most of us, Willis already felt like a surprise addition to Quentin Tarantino's follow-up to Reservoir Dogs, and perhaps the first example (along with John Travolta) of Tarantino's knack for 70's style stunt casting, where a big name comes along at the end of the opening cast list to really put a spin on your expectations. Butch Coolidge is probably Willis' second most iconic role, though funnily enough, I just had to look up what his last name was. (Do they ever even say it in the movie?) This role may demonstrate more range than Willis has ever displayed in one performance, from the eternal take of Butch quietly listening to Marcellus' speech, to the anger and frustration involved with the loss of his watch, to baby talk with his girlfriend. This, here, is a star.

1. Die Hard (1988) - Number one had to be Die Hard. The best action movie of all time remains one of the all-time best breakout performances for a movie star. Willis' everyday NYC cop, unwittingly transplanted to La La Land for Christmas, is effortlessly identifiable to the audience -- not because we are police officers or would have any clue how to singlehandedly take down a building full of terrorists, but because John McClane handles every new piece of information with exactly the bemusement/frustration that we would feel, and with the ingenuity we would hope to produce. He's the ultimate aspirational character for a certain brand of audience member, who wants to brave in a time of extreme danger but also knows he or she could end up pulling broken glass fragments out of bloodied feet and praying aloud not to die. 

Honorable mention: 

The Story of Us (1999) - This is a personal favorite that I had to throw in there. It's a different sort of role for Willis, where he plays the estranged husband of Michelle Pfeiffer and the father of two kids. They have a trial separation while the two kids are off at summer camp, and the film considers the couple's present, history, and future together during the course of that summer. I suppose it has the contours of a romantic comedy -- which is actually how we first got to know Willis in Moonlighting -- but it's more poignant and contemplative than funny, and I don't think it produces any easy answers, even if it finishes in a way that feels easier than such a real world situation might be. I love this movie for its ultimate optimism, for the performances (Pfeiffer slays me in a scene near the end), and for its attention to detail, particularly a montage of moments from their history set to "Classical Gas."

All six of those movies were movies I had already tagged on my blog and written about previously. Yep, Bruce Willis has definitely been a big part of my cinematic upbringing. 

As one indication of how poor his choices had been, and how much he was being taken advantage of, he doesn't just have one or two roles in the can, as many actors who are taken from us prematurely do. No, Willis has eight movies in the can. Whether any of them will be worth a squirt of piss, or 90 to 120 minutes of our time, is another matter. 

But maybe we'll be ten percent more likely to watch those movies, and other movies he's made in the past decade, just to appreciate him -- and to see if we can see the signs of this terrible affliction. I regret any time I referred to one of his performances as "sleepwalking" through a movie. It now seems clear that giving those performances was extremely difficult for him, even if it was, at some point, the laziness and disinterest talking rather than the aphasia.

But as I said earlier, today is not the day to impugn Bruce Willis, nor to call in to question any of his past choices. Maybe even the right-wing political leanings were evidence of the aphasia. That would explain a lot.

Until they have a cure, fare thee well, Bruce.

Life as a montage

This is the tenth in my Double Jeopardy series, in which I'm revisiting films that got high grades from me, but not from most other people. I want to see who's right and who's wrong. The series runs on Tuesdays.

I have so many entry points for discussing Rob Reiner's The Story of Us that I don't really know where to begin. So, apologies in advance if this becomes a bit disorganized.

Let's start by addressing something obvious, for those of you who read my sidebar features closely. That's not a formatting error you see there -- The Story of Us is, in fact, the last two movies I've most recently revisited. I watched it Sunday afternoon by myself while my wife was taking a nap, and then when she awoke -- perfectly timed to the end credits -- I felt really disappointed that I hadn't made a stronger case to have her watch it with me. So I told her I would watch it again, if she was interested. She was, so we did, about four hours later. She probably figured, if I'm willing to see a movie twice in one day, it's probably worth her seeing it once.

That should take away some of the suspense about whether I still like Reiner's film, a decade after I first saw it. Or was it more like nine years after I second saw it? Only after finishing what turned out to be my third viewing did I realize I had inadvertently broken the rules of my own Double Jeopardy series. This series was supposed to be comprised of films I've seen only once before, but I had forgotten until Sunday afternoon that I had already submitted The Story of Us to a form of double jeopardy, all the way back in 2001. (Which made this a triple jeopardy, and the eventual fourth viewing the first time the movie was being watched purely for pleasure since my first viewing.) The movie came out in 1999, and I probably caught it on video in 2000. I really liked it, but I also knew I was in the minority. So when I got the chance to review The Story of Us in 2001, I made myself watch it again, just to see if I might have been overcome by a temporary inability to judge the quality of films.

Nope. Still liked it. But then I did something I now very much regret -- I wrote a review that was positive, but hedged its bets by being lukewarm and out-and-out critical in a couple spots as well. See, the site I write for had given the film a star rating before anyone wrote a review -- a common practice based on the general critical consensus about a film. That star rating was two out of five. It's always acceptable to diverge from the star rating -- especially if you are writing something that's more positive, since the reviews are syndicated on sites that sell DVDs. But at that time, I was fairly new at this, and thought that I had to make my positive review reflect the critical consensus evident in those two stars. So instead of writing the 3.5-star review I wanted to write, I wrote one that was probably closer to 2.5 stars.

If I wrote a review of The Story of Us today, I might actually give it four stars. And I almost wish I could take back that re-ranking of the movie I did on Flickchart, which I wrote about here. (If you are keeping track, this is my third entry point to discussing the film.) To sum up what I wrote ten days ago, I temporarily lost control of a sequence of duels on Flickchart, and the eventual end result was that The Story of Us jumped all the way up to my 25th favorite film of all time. Wanting to correct the error, I removed it from my seen movies and started re-ranking it from scratch. Needless to say, #25 is still too high for it, but after my two screenings on Sunday, I feel like I would be very comfortable having it in my top several hundred movies.

So why do I like this movie so much more than anyone else? Well, I'll tell you.

The movie was referred to sarcastically at the time as When Harry Broke Up With Sally. It stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple married for 15 years, who are taking advantage of having their son and daughter away at camp for the summer, to try out a separation that may ultimately lead to divorce. The movie begins a few days before the kids leave for camp, and ends when they return. In between, Ben and Katie Jordan do their best to live their lives apart, with the inevitable moments together -- some of which are positive, some of which remind them why they're no longer suited to be together. The movie progresses along during their present tense of that summer, but it also flashes back to the memories they're cataloguing of 15 years of marriage. These memories are triggered by conversations they have with their friends (a well-cast group of Reiner, Rita Wilson, Paul Reiser and Julie Hagerty), as well as mundane things that happen in everyday life.

And here's where the movie impresses me immensely on a technical level. I am a person who applauds when someone really "commits" -- when an artist or a performer gives it his/her all, beyond the call of duty, to produce the desired artistic outcome. And the filmmaking team behind The Story of Us really commit to showing us Ben and Katie's marriage. I wish I had gone back and counted, but to give us as many snippets of their life together as possible, the costume and makeup departments give Willis and Pfeiffer dozens of different hairstyles and wardrobes, and Reiner shoots them in dozens of different locations (including an on-location shoot in Venice, Italy -- something he notably did not do when he hopped continents on green screens for The Bucket List). What I find so impressive about this is that these hairstyles and wardrobes do not usually appear in entire scenes -- they are often quick flashes in montages, seen by the viewer for only a second or two. Most films cannot afford such complicated setups for such little overt narrative payoff. Like, a whole wedding between Ben and Katie, in which Reiner (as the best man) somehow really looks 20 years younger, just for five seconds of screen time? The budgetary math doesn't add up.

Which is why I'm trying to give this film the ink it deserves now, that it never got then. I appreciate every hair on Pfeiffer's head that you crimped with a crimping iron, every time you applied that long-haired toupee on the bald Willis. And I'm sorry more people didn't. The most affecting montage comes near the climax of the movie, with Mason Williams' "Classical Gas" playing as you see each child born, each child's pet die, each time Ben or Katie says I love you, each time Ben or Katie says I hate you. And everything else in between.

What's great also is how the memories are balanced within the overall plot. I'd almost call this a structurally perfect script. It steps away from the present tense for the perfect amount of time, every time, and supplies the memories we need at just the right moment to contextualize future events in the plot. It's downright masterful -- special props to Jessie Nelson and Alan Zweibel, who share the screenwriting credit.

And speaking of the writing ... one of the most common misconceptions about this film, I assume, is that it's depressing. Yes, there's a lot of squabbling, and yes, it's about a couple considering divorce. But what I was really amazed at was the number of times I laughed at the clever writing. The supporting characters get a lot of the funniest lines, and thank God they're there. Wilson is in fine form, Reiner seems comfortable and affable, and Reiser is wickedly funny. Reiner knows that this movie can't be glum, or else it won't fit into the marketing category of a romantic comedy. The Story of Us gives romantic comedies a good name by being about something a lot more than most of them are about.

Remember when I said things might get disorganized here? That's what happens when you are writing about something you feel really passionate about.

And I think there's an additional reason I felt so passionate about this film this time around. Unlike the first two times I saw it, I am now married with a partner I love, on the precipice of having children. (Literally -- the baby will probably come next week.) What I appreciated in the abstract before was something that I can now appreciate more concretely -- that marriage is a marathon with peaks and valleys, times when you will love the other person and times when you (only temporarily, you hope) will hate them. I am fortunate to say that I've spent 2.5 years of marriage in 95% bliss. But we haven't nearly gotten to the hard part, and movies like The Story of Us make you appreciate what can happen to make otherwise blissful marriages hard. The movie expertly documents Ben and Katie as they grow from feckless twentysomethings to burdened fortysomethings, yet their character traits continue on a throughline that never makes you doubt that these are the same people, just aged 15 years. Willis and Pfeiffer deserve incredible credit for this in terms of their acting -- Pfeiffer has an amazing monologue near the end of this movie that's just heartbreaking -- but it's the whole experience that's been created for us that really makes this movie the complete package. We know the performances are strong, but what these characters are saying is what makes them sing -- topics that are unobtrusively and humorously discussed are as diverse as mortality, fidelity, the influence of in-laws on a marriage, the tension between the need to be responsible and the need to have fun, and whether an ass is really an ass, or just the fatty tops of your legs.

The Story of Us could be the story of anybody, and it's incredibly enriching, whether you're a parent, a child, a husband, a wife, or none of the above. You'll laugh and you might cry ... I don't mind tell you I did.

During both of Sunday's viewings.

And that's really saying something.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, The Story of Us: An unjustly panned film that just gets more observant and more nuanced the older you get and the more life experiences you have.

Tainted!

I went from February until July without writing about Flickchart on my blog -- and now I'm doing it for the third time in the space of two weeks. Sometimes things just go that way.

And because I know the Flickchart creators sometimes look in on my blog, I want to start by telling them that I don't blame the site itself in the least for the following story -- I blame my computer, pure and simple.

Okay, so I'm very anal about making sure all my Flickchart duels have the correct winner. If you choose poorly or hastily between the two choices in front of you, the site has a handy-dandy Undo button, which I have availed myself of on numerous occasions. I don't want to let a single poor decision creep through and muck up my whole list.

Yesterday, my computer acted up in a way that took the ability to go back and correct right out of my hands.

I'd just gotten home from work and hauled my computer onto my lap for a couple minutes of random dueling. I love these little Flickchart breaks, which are usually finite in duration according to little parameters I put in place. I'll say "I'll duel until I get one lower film to beat a higher film," or, "I'll duel until I get one duel featuring one of my top 20 movies." Because I've done over 83,000 duels, either of these can take a little while -- anywhere from one to five minutes. And then I'll go do something else.

But because of some state the computer was in, where the inner circuits were telling it that the mouse click mechanism was depressed, or because of some way my palm was brushing over the mouse pad in between my two thumbs, I suddenly made a flurry of unknown duel choices. The posters rapidly changed, and I noticed that results were being recorded -- this film held its position, that film jumped forward 700 spots. I was aghast by the 700-spot jump, but it wasn't the end of the world -- it was the original Friday the 13th jumping from a spot that was probably too low (in the 2700s, out of 2950) to a spot that was slightly too high (in the early 2100s). Because Flickchart sometimes freaks out a little bit in situations like this, where a flurry of unexpected stimuli registers actions on the site, the Undo button was not available as an option. But having Friday the 13th ranked in this position didn't seem fatal to the integrity of the list.

I thought I was past this temporary trauma, but then it happened again, this time faster and with more dire results.

The little flurry ended with Inside Man jumping 800 spots, from around 1000 to #220. Looking at my live list of rankings just now, that means it beat Total Recall. Sure, there are plenty of people who might rank Inside Man above Total Recall, but I am not one of them. However, again I decided I could live with it. Inside Man would eventually make its way back to the appropriate spot through the random dueling process. I could live with it being ranked higher for six months or a year before finding its rightful place again. But just to make sure there was not a third session of random ranking, I closed my web browser and reopened it.

There were no recurrences of the problem, but it was only a few minutes later that I discovered one of the consequences of this uncontrolled period of blind ranking.

I got a duel between The Story of Us and Mission: Impossible III, and I gave the win to The Story of Us. You can imagine my surprise when Flickchart proceeded to jump The Story of Us from #1300-something in the standings ... all the way up to #25.

This is when I slapped my forehead and knew that my Flickchart rankings had been irrevocably tainted.

What apparently happened was that Mission: Impossible III had won a blind duel that had jumped it all the way up to #25. So when The Story of Us beat it, it assumed the #25 spot, pushing the Cruise flick down to #26. Consulting my rankings again, it appears that M:I III had won a blind duel against ... wait for it ... Fargo. The horror.

I sat for a moment and wondered what I would do. I actually like The Story of Us quite a bit -- it's a candidate to be reconsidered in my Double Jeopardy feature that runs on Tuesdays, since most people (those who have seen it, anyway) do not share my high opinion of it. But #25? I couldn't handle it. I could see it belonging around 800, but no higher than that.

And it wasn't just one interloper, but two. The fault really lay with the elevated ranking for Mission Impossible, but the problem had already started to multiply. Now, in order to force those two movies downward to their correct spots, I would need other films to beat them -- which shouldn't be a problem. But then I'd have to deal with the separate problem of those films being ranked too highly. Before long, my top 100 films would become unrecongizable.

I realized there was only one thing I could do: I had to remove the offending films and start ranking them again from scratch.

For an ordinary Flickcharter, this might not be such a big deal. But for an anal retentive bastard like me, I felt the pain. You see, Flickchart keeps a stats page of how your films have performed over time -- how many times you've ranked each film, and what percentage of duels it's won. An anal retentive bastard like me believes that those stats have some kind of intrinsic value -- they mean something in the imaginary "record books" that no one but me (and others like me) probably cares about. So my pain wasn't so much a result of the fact that I'd have to begin the process anew of getting these movies to their appropriate spots in the rankings, but that I'd be wiping out this history -- this history that means something intangible yet powerful to me.

But I had to do it.

I first went to the page for The Story of Us. I'd ranked it 56 times and it had won 59% of its duels. I clicked Remove From My Flickchart. I clicked Add to My Flickchart. When you add a new movie, it subjects it to three random duels to get an initial ranking. It won two of those duels. Its new stats? Three times dueled, 66.67% won.

It was harder when I moved on to the next two. Both Mission: Impossible III and Inside Man were part of the initial 300-400 movies they give you automatically when you first join Flickchart, movies that are considered the most popular. (They do this so that new Flickcharters aren't immediately confronted with My Dinner With Andre and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.) So these two movies had been dueled a lot more -- as it happened, 99 times each. Oy. Pretty soon, they too were back down to three duels apiece. And the integrity of my list had been restored.

Oh, I decided to just leave Friday the 13th where it was.

All in all, not a big deal. So why am I writing about it today? In fact, why am I writing so many words about it that the sensible ones among you have already stopped reading?

Well, it's just another insight into the passion I feel both for movies and for lists. And now you get why I have such passion for Flickchart, 'cause it's got both. If you haven't started yet, what are you waiting for? www.flickchart.com