Volume 18 - Inside Llewyn Davis and the Fractured Folk Tale

It's been a long time since the ol' Double Feature Picture show had something new for y'all, and I'd love to tell you I have a super exciting and cool reason for that. The truth of the matter is, well, this time of year always makes me cranky and reminds me of death. And when I'm not thinking about my real world work - which, thankfully(?), takes up a lot of my time, that's what I've been thinking about lately. And no, it's not the cool kind of death, like we see in Friday the 13th movies or other films of their ilk. It's the kind of death and sadness that's inevitably coming for us all and ready to send our lives into turmoil at any given moment.

So, that's a cool story, right?  Sorry, I don't want to think about it either. It's just who I am.

The good thing about movies is that there's a movie for every feeling, and one day while I was angry at how cold and dreary and threatening the world around me was I started to think about a movie where the lead character feels the same way. It's one of my favorite movies of the last decade, and I was inspired to stop being stuck in my own head and to talk about it here.  It took me a while to make sense of everything, and I can't promise what follows will make sense or be fun to read, but I hope you'll take a trip into this film's world with me and see where this double feature ends up. It might not be a fun trip, but life isn't always a fun trip either.

Inside Llewyn Davis

2013, Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

We meet Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, on a night where he's playing folk music in a dark New York City club. The year is 1961, the song is "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" - a pretty depressing tune that asks just what the title implies - and the singer's body language is enough to make us assume he's either half asleep or entirely defeated. The venue is dark enough that we can't see the faces of the small crowd gathered around him, and if you weren't looking closely you might assume he's playing to a bunch of mannequins. Llewyn is doing the best he can, he just doesn't seem to be connecting to his audience. The night ends on a worse note for Llewyn, with a man he doesn't know confronting him in the alley behind the bar and, for reasons we don't yet understand, handing the emotionally distraught singer a physical beating. 

It would be nice to think that this is just a bad night in the life of the man, who we can already tell is very good at what he does, but the rest of Joel & Ethan Coen's film confirms a simple truth - life is not going very well for Llewyn Davis. He's homeless, the woman he's closest to (Carey Mulligan) has moved on and become vicious toward him, and the winter that fills the world around him seems cruel and unyielding. We learn early in the week we spend with Llewyn that he was once part of a successful folk duo and that his partner has died, with Llewyn later revealing in a moment of frustration that this partner committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. We don't meet his band mate, only hearing others talk about "Mikey" in the past tense to Llewyn, and as we watch Llewyn stumble through a series of failures at times we lose focus on this part of his story.

Another thing that is repeatedly lost throughout the story is a cat. Llewyn, after spending the night on a couch at his friends' apartment, accidentally releases their pet cat into the city as he closes the locked door apartment door behind them. The cat becomes Llewyn's off-and-on traveling companion throughout the film, even riding along with him as he hitches a ride to Chicago to meet a producer that might be able to give him a paying gig. The ride to Chicago - shared with a rude jazz musician (Coen favorite John Goodman) and his gruff valet (Garrett Hedlund) - tests Llewyn's patience greatly. Llewyn goes from being quiet and disinterested early in the trip to lashing out in anger when pushed too far, and at this point in the film we've grown accustomed to seeing him react to stressors and questions in an abrupt, angry manner. We build up sympathy for the performer and the man as he moves from place to place, but what follows at the end of his trip is the film's most heartbreaking scene.

Llewyn gets a chance to meet with club owner & potential manager Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), and is dejected to find that the man he's interviewing with did not receive the copy of his album, which shares its title with the film, that his agent sent ahead of him. Grossman decides that he will still give Llewyn a chance to perform for him - finally, the film gives Llewyn a break! - directly instructing him to "play something from Inside Llewyn Davis."

We know where Llewyn is mentally at this point. He's been insulted, beaten, and defeated for several days, and we can tell by his relationships with others that this is not a new trend. We've seen him lash out, we've seen him assume other people aren't as good as him, and we've seen him make mistakes - like turning down the chance at royalties on a comedy tune ("Please Mr. Kennedy," on which Isaac teams with co-stars Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver for the film's most humorous scene) because he needed cash in the moment. It's clear that Llewyn is committed to what he's doing, and it's obvious that he's really good at what he does. The issue, again, is that he's not connecting with anyone right now. 

Llewyn pulls out his guitar in the quiet club, sits down in front of Mr. Grossman, and plays and sings his heart out. The song he chooses is "The Death of Queen Jane," a variation of an old English ballad, and - as you might have guessed from the title - it's not the most uplifting choice. The song tells a fictionalized account of a Queen who begs for help to save her child during a difficult labor and, after being rebuked by her nurses and her King, dies during childbirth. Llewyn performs beautifully; we can hear the pain he's been through in every note. He belts out the final notes with his guitar silent, letting all of the emotion that's been trapped inside him, and waits a long moment for the first impression that he's made on Grossman.

Finally, the listener speaks.

"I don't see a lot of money here."

Anyone who's had a job interview knows that macabre tales about death aren't usually the best first impression, and it might be easy for viewers to wonder why the heck Llewyn would make that choice. But for Llewyn, this song is personal. He feels like he can't get help, he feels like the world is closing in on him, and he knows that if something doesn't change soon he's going to be gone and the music is going to be all he leaves behind. He's too proud for any of that. Llewyn and Grossman have a brief conversation, in which Llewyn is given a series of suggestions about doing more to connect with people including "stay out of the sun" and, most crushingly, getting back together with his partner. Llewyn is too far gone to tell Mr. Grossman why that's not an option at this point, he simply thanks him for his time and moves on. He's just given a beautiful performance that he put all of his energy into, he doesn't have the strength to talk about it anymore.

Despite everything that has gone wrong in his life and career, Llewyn continues to walk toward his next opportunity. The viewer might wonder if Llewyn still believes life has any value after a series of misfortunes and that's where his costar - the cat - comes back into play. No matter what is going on and how distant he seems from everyone else in his world, he keeps looking out for the cat that continues to get away from him. This simple act - trying to get the cat home safely - tells us a lot about where Llewyn is at. He wants to make things right and to be accepted, he just keeps getting knocked down as he tries.

Llewyn's first musical performance in the film makes him appear to be already worn out, and his performance for Bud Grossman pushes him closer to defeat. But when we get to his final performance of the film, an expanded version of the opening scene, we know more about the man.
After a full week of defeat and failure, we understand how little he has to show for his effort. The Coens frame the performance differently this time around and offer us a close up of the singer's face after the final note, so we see him wipe his nose and can see that his eyes are holding back tears. We've known for a while that the music is all he has, but here we can really see how much it means to him. He gets the same muted applause we saw in the opening scene as he jokes "You've probably heard that one before; 'cause it was never new and it never gets old and it's a folk song."

Then we see the part of his performance that was omitted from the opening scene. Llewyn turns back to the microphone and adds "Alright, one more before I go."

The song that follows, "Fare Thee Well," is one we partially heard earlier in the film; one that was abruptly cut short by another of his frustrated outbursts. His cat owning friends, the Gorfeins, ask him to play for them at dinner - Mrs. Gorfein even rebukes Llewyn's initial refusal by saying "I thought singing was a joyous expression of the soul?" - and the dejected singer does his best to belt out the tune before Mrs. Gorfein chimes in singing Mike's part, sending Llewyn over the edge. It's the angriest we see Llewyn throughout the film, and it's the moment we most understand how frustrated he is.

Now, safe from interruption on stage, Llewyn hurls himself into another performance of the song. While most of his performances in the film have been beautiful, this is the one that soars. What he's doing is far from being a joyous expression of the soul, what he's doing is a release of all the depression and loss that have been trapped inside. In this moment, Llewyn is done letting the troubles of the world, including the grief he feels after losing his partner, affect him. He is lost in the song, and his voice soars. I get goosebumps every time I watch Isaac perform this scene - which includes at least a dozen viewings of the scene in the last week - because it's a beautiful picture of a man who knows life is not going to take it easy on him; a man who is expressing himself and escaping the world in the only way he can.

Llewyn's moment might be short-lived - the performer that begins to sing after he leaves the stage appears to be a young Bob Dylan, singing a similarly themed song entitled "Fare The Well" - but it's impossible to miss how much being able to perform this song meant to Llewyn as a form of release. What follows is the second half of the opening scene, including the beating in the alley, but even in that moment we see Lllewyn differently than we did the first time around.

Llewyn isn't directly confronting his feelings about the world, but he's dealing with things the way he can. The people in Llewyn's life often think he's lost, and we can understand their reactions to seeing part of his life and part of his career. But we've spent the whole week with Llewyn Davis, and we can see things more clearly than we could during his first performance. We see that he's fighting to live through whatever the world throws at him, and that it's his music that's helping him deal with all the grief and loss in his life.

In short, we see that the heart of a survivor lives inside Llewyn Davis.

(One last note - I freakin' love this cat. Isaac gives one of my favorite performances ever here. And the cat, in true cat fashion, just looks at him like "Fuck you, I'm stealing all these scenes." And he does. You go, cat.)

I obviously wanted to say a lot about Inside Llewyn Davis (if you've read this far you must be sick of it by now), and when it became time to pick a double feature partner my mood changed quite a bit. Like Llewyn choosing "The Death of Queen Jane," the first impression I'm offering for this double feature might come off as a little morbid for some people.

• We'll start with the obvious here - music is the heart of this movie. 
• Considering the mood I've been in, the first instinct I had was to make this double feature about grief and loss. I thought about discussing a lot of my favorite dramatic films that make me feel the same emotions that Inside Llewyn Davis does.
• But then I stopped and thought about how I felt while writing about Inside Llewyn Davis. And that's when I started to realize that while I was already feeling down about life - I was also working myself into a deeper emotional frenzy by focusing entirely on the topic of grief and loss. And that's when I started to realize that I couldn't keep going in that direction and create a double feature that I - let alone anyone else - would really enjoy watching if I didn't shake things up a little.

Based on those simple factors, I did what the proverbs told me to do and checked myself before I wrecked myself. Well, Llewyn wrecked me a little - but it was a good wrecking. Still, it's a wrecking that needs to be medicated - and we all know what more traditional proverbs say is the best medicine.

A Mighty Wind

2003, Directed by Christopher Guest

A Mighty Wind is another film about folk music that's set in New York City in the wake of a death in the folk music world, and if that makes it sound like an ideal companion for Inside Llewyn Davis to you....you should know that that's where the similarities basically end.

The third mockumentary from star/writer/director/all-around genius Christopher Guest follows three folk music groups as they reunite for a concert to honor the promoter that brought them all to fame. If you were to consider this the same folk music universe that Llewyn lived in, it has been more than forty years since his attempts to make it big and, considering these three bands, you'd probably assume he didn't make it.  If you took the film seriously you might also probably think that's a good thing for Llewyn. But that's ok - because you really shouldn't take this film seriously.

So, I'm telling you not to think about A Mighty Wind the same way as Inside Llewyn Davis. Why, then, in the name of common sense, am I telling you to double feature this with that film? I'll allow two better men than me to describe my reasoning.

Frankenstein's monster once said:

"Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it."

I think Llewyn would agree with the big green monster on this point, though I doubt he would be willing to say it. (Again, he's too proud.) Llewyn is a man who is lost, but he doesn't give up. I've already made this point, but I need to repeat it, because it's the thing that keeps his film from being a total downer. That's good. But it might not be enough.

The second wise man I'd like to consult is Rod Kimble, the eponymous hero of the 2007 classic Hot Rod. He had a similar, but slightly different, take on life:

"Life is pain...and we've got to scrape the joy out of it every chance we get."

Like Llewyn, the characters in A Mighty Wind have been down and out. All three groups reached fame and lost it, and are now only back in the spotlight for a one-night only tribute concert. The Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer - reuniting in a band that's not quite Spinal Tap) were best known for one catchy song - "Eat at Joe's" - about a restaurant, and haven't made much of an impact on the folk scene since. They were replaced in the folk spotlight by The Main Street Singers, now reunited as The "New" Main Street Singers, whose aggressive cheerfulness makes them feel like a musical edition of The Brady Bunch. These two bands are informal rivals - they're not bitter against each other, they just don't exist on the same wavelength - and the difference between them is one of the film's most subtle jokes until it comes to a head during the concert.

The third group we meet is a duo, Mitch and Mickey (Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara), whose hit single "There's a Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" took over the music world as a symbol of true love. It's a sincerely great song (it even earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song that year), but unfortunately the performers had a severe falling out in the years that followed their success. Now, back together for one night, we get the treat of O'Hara's Mickey trying to pretend everything's fine while Levy presents Mitch as a man who's been through consistent emotional turmoil since the break up.  His performance is one of my favorite in comedy cinema, and the story arc that follows Mitch and Mickey is what pushes A Mighty Wind over the top as my favorite of Guest's comedies. (To be fair, it's a close race. Tomorrow I might say Waiting for Guffman is my favorite. The man is too good at what he does.)

Mickey is the closest comparison to Llewyn Davis that we find in this film, because he too is completely defeated by the world and seems to have lost connection with everyone around him. But again - that's where the comparisons stop. Because A Mighty Wind is not a film about the anguish of life, A Mighty Wind is a film that provides the joy we need to scrape out of life. It's a comedic tale about a lot of people that are down on their luck, presented primarily as a whimsical comedy with a few heartfelt moments where love and humanity triumph over pain. 

I was caught up in my own grief and sadness when I started writing this double feature, and that really helped me to appreciate Inside Llewyn Davis more. I watched it three times preparing this double feature and though it's always been a favorite it became almost medicinal this month. It means the world to me, and I love the reminders about life it provides. But it's also good to remember that life can make us laugh, that life can make us happy, and that life can provide us with love. And that's what A Mighty Wind, the second tale of defeated folk musicians we're talking about today, has to offer. 

I haven't said enough about A Mighty Wind, other than that I love it dearly for its heart and it's humor, but I also feel like saying how much heart and humor it has is enough to explain why it belongs in this double feature. It's important to understand loss and sadness, but it can't be the only thing we're focused on. That's no way to get through the day. We need people that make us smile and make us feel joy too. 

Maybe this double feature won't work for you, but it's the double feature I needed this month. Spending time with Llewyn Davis and Mitch & Mickey did a lot to remind me what I need to do to face the world. It got some good tunes stuck in my head, made me think about some great performances, and - like Frankenstein's monster and Rod Kimble - reminded me that life has some good in it. Sometimes that's exactly what we need.

Volume 14 - Jackie Brown and the Inconvenient Criminal Romance

Welcome back to the Double Feature Picture Show, and a double feature that's probably the easiest one I've ever come up with. And yet - people don't really talk about these two movies together. In fact, I don't think people talk about both of these movies near enough, because they're two of my favorite movies of all-time.

So, here's two films from the late '90s, by two of the most acclaimed directors of the last 25 years. What's our common theme here, you ask? Aside from some obvious connections, I think it's that crime can be pretty romantic.

Yeah, that's a weird thing to say. But let's take a look at a couple of films and see what happens.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Jackie Brown

1997, Directed by Quentin Tarantino

There are people that think you're a snob when you say Jackie Brown is your favorite Quentin Tarantino film. It's the hipster answer to that question, they say. I don't like those people very much. I forgive them. It's not like there's a bad answer to that question. Dude is pretty talented.

That said, Jackie Brown is definitely my favorite Quentin Tarantino film. I could list a lot of reasons for that, the simplest of which is that the characters in the film are just so beautiful to me. There are a bunch of great characters played by great actors here, but the two characters at the center of the film - Pam Grier's Jackie Brown and Robert Forster's Max Cherry - are two people I truly love.

By rule, when your name is in the title you're probably the center of the film. That's true of Jackie Brown, a 44 year old stewardess for a small Mexican airline who lives in Los Angeles and moonlights as an employee for a gun-running crime lord, Ordell Robbie. Ordell is played by Samuel L. Jackson who, with all apologies to Pulp Fiction, might give his most vulgarly Samuel L. Jackson (that's the verb usage, as in "He Samuel L. Jacksoned the hell out of that profane rant") performance here. One of the major complaints about this film when it was released is how willingly Tarantino and Jackson were to fill the script with racial slurs - a criticism that would return with a vengeance when Django Unchained happened - but it's the profane portrayal of Ordell that really sets up the viewer to support Jackie. Her participation in his crime operation is never fully explained, however it's clear that she needs to take these actions to make ends meet.

Jackie is a criminal - she willingly runs money for Ordell - but she's never portrayed as a bad person. This is especially true in the eyes of Max, the bail bondsman Ordell hires to pick her up from jail after she is caught bringing in a package for him. Forster's Max is a person who seems to be in tune with everyone he meets, something of an empath who doesn't judge the people he meets while being careful about who he trusts based on his perceptions. It's clear from their first meeting that he knows Ordell is not to be trusted, and also it's clear when he sees Jackie that he's enamored with her.

Max has always appealed to me as a character because he's caught up in something he didn't really intend to join - the world of Ordell and his criminal enterprise is surely outside his professional comfort zone - yet he never really wavers in his emotions. He's a calm, introspective character, and he always keeps his emotions close to his chest. We can see by his approach that he's intrigued by Jackie, but there are no grand proclamations of love from the stoic man. When they meet in her house one morning - Max had to stop over because Jackie borrowed his gun without permission, naturally - a song she likes draws his attention. To me, that means he's in love.

The song Tarantino features here, Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time) by The Delfonics, is a soulful ballad that sounds a lot more romantic than it is. It's the kind of song you'd expect a woman who grew up in the 1970s to play, not the kind of song you'd expect a bail bondsman to be into. He asks what it is, she tells him, and he heads straight out to a music store from the '90s to buy the cassette tape for his car. (Man, that scene is a glorious time capsule when you watch it today. If you lived through the '90s like I did, you knew that store.) I can't confirm this is the only song Max listened to for the rest of the time he knew Jackie, yet every time we see Max in his car he's listening to it. And that just makes my heart smile. I like to believe he listened to that song on repeat for weeks. 

I can tell you, as a stoic hopeless romantic myself, there's nothing better than a soulful ballad that sounds a lot more romantic than it is. Especially if it reminds you of someone you can't stop thinking about. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Forster's Max tells Jackie "I'm 56 years old. I can't blame anyone for anything I do." - yet we know deep inside that he's just enamored with the opportunity to be in Jackie's life at this moment. He made the choice to follow her into a tricky con game with Ordell and the choice to buy a cassette full of soothing melodies. He never really chose to be caught up in Jackie the way he is though, that just happened when he saw her.

The heart wants what the heart wants, even if it's the heart of a 56 year old bail bondsman. Robert Forster got an Academy Award nomination for this role, and even though Burt Reynolds and Robin Williams were great that year I'd vote for him to win that statue every day. Though it's Pam Grier's movie, and a great tribute to her reign over exploitation cinema of the 1970s, the reaction she gets from Max is what gives Jackie Brown the biggest heart of any Tarantino film. Viewers might come for the catchy crime plot and the snappy dialogue that the director made famous, but for me it's the meaningful platonic relationship between the heroine and her friend that really makes this film soar.

If you know anything about Jackie Brown's cast, the source material that it was adapted from, or the time period when it came out, you've probably got an idea where I'm going with this double feature. For those that don't let's take a look at the reasons for the double feature I'm about to offer up.

• Jackie Brown is adapted from a novel, Rum Punch, by one of the great crime writers of the late 20th century, Elmore Leonard. Leonard had already been a force in Hollywood for more than 25 years by the mid '90s, with plenty of his works being adapted and several screenwriting credits. He experienced something of a reappraisal in the mid '90s, and from 1995-1998 three of his more recent novels were adapted into successful Hollywood crime flicks.
• Tarantino made Jackie Brown with Grier in the lead because he wanted to make a movie for her, despite the fact the lead character in Rum Punch was a white woman named Jackie Burke. (The name change is a nod to Foxy Brown, one of Grier's most famous roles.) The next adaptation of Leonard's work also starred a minority woman in a role that the author had written as white. Two major Hollywood productions that cast women of color in white roles? That's something we don't see every day, and it's very double feature worthy.
• And, of course, I'm looking to expand on the theme I mentioned in the introduction - the romantic aspect of crime. Jackie Brown succeeds because Jackie, a criminal, is presented as a complex individual in a complex situation. Max, who seems like he should be a straight arrow kind of guy in his line of work, is portrayed as someone who sees the bigger picture and is willing to consider multiple sides of the story. These are the kind of characters that a lot of movies and books don't understand, yet Leonard and the two fine directors working on these films were willing to blur the lines between right and wrong when feelings get involved.

So, let's jump ahead almost six months to the day from the Christmas 1997 release of Jackie Brown to June 26, 1998, and the summer release of a very different, yet very romantic, Elmore Leonard adaptation.

Out of Sight

1998, Directed by Steven Soderbergh

You're not wrong if you think the relationship between Jackie Brown and Max Cherry is sexy; they're two of the most beautiful souls I've seen in film, and the movie leaves plenty of opportunities for the mentally adventurous to write some fan fiction about their love. The next major Leonard adaptation out of the gate in Hollywood, Out of Sight, is a far more direct attempt to get your knickers in a twist. And it's a pretty good - and pretty tasteful - one at that. More on that in a minute. We can't get right down to the sexiness without setting the mood, can we?

(No. We can't. I'm not like that, you guys. KEEP YOUR EYES UP HERE.)

(Thank you.)

If Robert Forster and Max Cherry are the men I want to be when I grow up (Spoiler alert: They are.) then George Clooney and Jack Foley are the men I wish I was when I was younger. Jack's a bank robber - and not a very good one, at that - which isn't a quality I wish I had. What he lacks in criminal prowess is made up for in pure coolness. Sure, he got busted robbing a bank because his car wouldn't start. But his plan to trick the teller into thinking a random dude was an associate with a gun was pretty clever. And he walks around like he's the man, and because of that...people kind of think he's the man. You gotta respect that confidence. My dad used to say "Walk like you know where you're going!" when I asked him why we were doing things like sneaking into Lambeau Field on a Friday afternoon, and I think Jack Foley's dad - or someone else in his life - might have taught him the same thing too.

Like Jackie Brown, Jack meets someone on the other side of the law when he gets out of prison. She's Karen Sisco, played by Jennifer Lopez, and she's a U.S. Marshal who's trying her hardest to be taken seriously in the predominantly male world of law enforcement. The problem she runs into when she meets Jack is that she's not supposed to be picking him up from prison - he just happens to escape into a parking lot that she's waiting in. She becomes a hostage of Jack and his partner Buddy, played by Ving Rhames (another role the author wrote as white that was changed during casting), and ends up riding in the trunk of her own car, playing little spoon to Jack while he's still filthy from his underground prison escape.

This is an uncomfortable predicament for her, but that cool confidence that Jack has been showing us made its way into the trunk too. Too calm to fight in a no-win situation, Karen begrudgingly accepts small talk with Jack, which turns into talk about movies that parallel their situations like Bonnie & Clyde and Three Days of the Condor. The latter film, in which fugitive Robert Redford strikes up a relationship with hostage Faye Dunaway, is a clear metaphor for their predicament and an inspiration for the film's approach to it. Even though Karen knows that Jack Foley is a criminal, there's something attractive about him. Because he looks like the guy who was voted Sexiest Man Alive in 1997, and also because he's cool in the face of such a unique situation.

He's a far different person than Jackie Brown, yet Jack Foley fits into same criminal profile in many ways. He's doing what he does because he can, because he's trying to get ahead. He's not violent, and when faced with a more savage criminal (like Ordell was to Jackie) he always seems to be on the side of peace and sanity, using his wit to keep himself afloat. He's less aggressive than Jackie, but they're both cunning and easy to root for.

Karen isn't necessarily rooting for Jack - after all, she's professionally obligated to get him back behind bars - though she is willing to give him a chance. The first time she sees him after their initial split, she pauses when the chance to bring him back in arises. Jack is shocked at her inaction, and sounds dumbfounded when he tells Buddy "She just sat there, looking right at me." To the outside viewer it's almost like Karen is in a trance when she sees him, but we've seen the thoughts she's had about him since they last met. She later describes wishing that they "could take a time out," and it becomes clear that she's taking things in stride the same way Jack is.

When they meet again, in a Detroit hotel bar with a snowy view of the seemingly peaceful city behind them, the result is one of the sexiest not-really-sex scenes ever put on film. Moments of Karen and Jack explaining their feelings are intercut with what happens when they make their way to her hotel room. The scenes in the hotel room are stunning, mostly because the film chooses not to show us what happens when they get to bed. 

We see them having drinks quietly, gently touching each other, and moving into the bedroom where they watch each other undress from opposite sides of the bed. David Holmes' musical score beautifully punctuates the whole sequence, leading up to the moment when they jump in bed with gleeful looks on their faces. The camera pauses on their embrace and kiss, and that's as far as we need to go. We've seen how much excitement they have to be in this moment, showing any more than that would actually make the whole thing less sexy.

Out of Sight and Jackie Brown both do a perfect job of showing us characters who come together despite the different paths they are on, and through all the films' similarities - I haven't even mentioned the fact that Michael Keaton plays the same character, ATF/FBI agent Ray Nicollete, in both films, placing them in a shared universe - that's the tie that really brings them together for me. Max, Jackie, Karen, and Jack all seem to be living in the moment despite the odds against them - and it's their willingness to accept their place in that moment and enjoy what they have that feels so pure and romantic to me.

We don't always get to choose how and when we meet someone in life, and circumstances that are outside our control may doom a romance from the start. It's worth taking a look at the characters in each of these films and the peace and happiness they find in their situations. None of them necessarily end up where they want to be, but they each come out of their situations with a hope that was missing from their life before and experience happiness they didn't expect to find during their brief moments together.

A nice thing about the world is that you don't have to be a criminal or the person responsible for their freedom (or lack thereof) to take the same approach to your life. Crime is an easy backdrop for these relationships in Leonard's stories, yet any of us could adapt the attitude of these characters to our relationships. The best scenes between these characters are fantastic reminders of how beautiful the moments we spend together can be, as long as we're willing to take chances and challenge ourselves to be open to the opportunities. 

Maybe it's not how we all should live our lives - fortune favors the bold....patience is a virtue....it's all so confusing! - but I like watching these characters do what they do for each other. So if you feel like watching foul-mouthed crime dramas that are led by some open minded romantics, this is the pair of films for you.

Volume 9 - Rebecca and the Haunted House of Hitchcock

We're heading into our third month here, and I'm starting to feel confident I won't just up and abandon all five of you that are reading this. Confidence is addictive, and I'm thinking the next step in our young friendship can be only one thing - a themed month of posts.

What kind of theme are we talking about? Well, I'm glad you asked. There's one man who casts the biggest shadow over cinema history in my eyes, and I feel like he's a guy who deserves at least a month's worth of posts about some of his films. That man is Alfred Hitchcock. Thus, September will be henceforth known as.....

Alfred Hitchcock Month! 

I know, it's simple. But it's effective. And the exclamation point gives it a nice kick.

It's something of a challenge to opine on Hitchcock's filmography these days - people have been writing about him for about 90 years, the takes aren't exactly fresh - so I'm going to be taking a few leaps of faith as I put together five double features involving the Master of Suspense. This week's leap might be the biggest, so stay with me here. I promise I'll try to make sense.

With no further ado (except for the ado I'm about to type), let's kick things off with Hitchcock's first American film.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Rebecca

1940, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

As a fan of all things Hitchcock, it's absolutely crazy to know that Rebecca is the only film directed by the man that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And it's especially surprising that the movie is as good as it is (Spoiler alert: I think it's very good) when you consider the relationship between Hitchcock, who was new to America, and the man he was working for - legendary Hollywood producer David O. Selznick. Many accounts of the film's production tell of their squabbles over various aspects of the film, ranging from Hitch's filming techniques to the adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's novel. People who first met Hitchcock through his later works might watch Rebecca and quickly realize that his signature style is at times muddled by the relationship with his producer, not to mention the strict Hays Code held over films of this era. The relationship between Selznick and Hitchcock did contribute to a couple of films that are relatively clunky compared to the director's other works, but thankfully Rebecca is not one of them.

For those unfamiliar, Rebecca is not the story of a woman named Rebecca. In fact, the woman at the center of the film - an innocent youngster (Joan Fontaine) who becomes the bride of the sophisticated Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) - has no name. Never once does a character in the film refer to her by name (kind of like Roddy Piper in They Live, but we'll save that for another double feature). They do, however, spend plenty of time talking about Rebecca, Maxim's deceased first wife. Those familiar with Hitchcock's standoffish attitude toward actresses might assume this rudeness toward the living lead character was his doing, but in fact the nameless lead character comes right out of Du Maurier's novel.

The second Mrs. De Winter, as she is often referred to, meets Maxim in the South of France, just as he appears to be contemplating suicide on the edge of a cliff. Instead of taking this as a sign that he's a bit tortured, she ends up in a whirlwind romance with him. She thinks he's marvelous, he thinks she's a cute child. When she nearly has to leave, he proposes with a super romantic "I'm asking you to marry me me, you little fool!" If it seems like their relationship is a little possessive, that's a shared byproduct of both the source novel and on set tensions. Olivier was upset that his then girlfriend, Vivien Leigh, didn't get the part over Fontaine, so he took his frustrations out on her. Hitchcock, who always thought anything he could use to build tension was worth a try, decided the best approach to this would be to tell Fontaine that everyone else on set hated her too. 

It seems ridiculous that this is how a major Hollywood picture - Selznick saw Rebecca as his first attempt to top the success he had in 1939 with Gone With The Wind - would function, but I guess that's how you put the "drama" in melodrama. Rebecca needed Olivier to be a bit angry as the widower who hasn't shaken off his past, and it needed Fontaine to be timid and frightened by her sudden ascent from paid traveling companion to wife living in a grand estate. Maybe the producer and director didn't go about getting that out of the actors in the right way, but they definitely got it out of them.

No disrespect to the leads - or Judith Anderson, who we'll get to in a minute - but the real star of Rebecca is Manderley, the estate that is Maxim and his new bride's home. The house itself was a miniature (Selznick couldn't find a location that suited his tastes), but it looms large over the entire movie. The opening narration by Fontaine is still one of the most haunting introductions ever put on film, setting the mood for the picture and foreshadowing things to come.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter...for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers...and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me."

If you haven't guessed by now, Manderley is haunted. It's not haunted in the traditional horror movie way, but it is haunted by memories of Rebecca. Everything Maxim's new bride tries to do in the house is met by not-so-subtle reminders that Rebecca did things differently or that Rebecca was "the most beautiful creature I ever saw" or that everyone in the house "simply adored Rebecca." The girl is already facing a big change in her life, and now everyone that meets her is comparing her to this ghost that's just hanging out in a giant bedroom in the off limits wing of the house.

The living face of the house's intimidation toward her is that of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper who happened to be Rebecca's closest confidant. Mrs. Danvers is played perfectly by Judith Anderson (I don't know who won the Oscar for Supporting Actress that year, but the voters must have got it wrong) and Hitchcock frames her as a constant reminder to the new bride that she is living in Rebecca's house. Hitchcock used Danvers the same way William Castle would later use characters in films like House on Haunted Hill, making her an unblinking character who seems to float from place to place. There are plenty of implications about Mrs. Danvers' relationship with the past Mrs. De Winter - implications that the Hays Code wouldn't let Hitchcock address - but her intentions toward the new bride are pretty obvious. She wants her gone from Manderley.

The second half of the film focuses on the deteriorating relationship between the still grieving Maxim and his new wife, who can't understand who or what she is supposed to be in this house. It's unfortunate that the film gets stuck in some mundane courtroom drama as it winds to a conclusion, but the house looms large over the finale. When we learn Rebecca's secret, we're reminded one last time that Manderley belonged to her, and that it always will.

Paranormal spirits may not be at work in this house, but the film's finale sends a message that echoes a passage from Fontaine's opening narration, confirming once and for all that this house is no longer a home.

"I looked upon a desolate shell...with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. We can never go back to Manderley again. That much is certain."

Picking a double feature to go with Rebecca is a tall challenge. It's a 130 minute melodrama that can stand alone pretty well. But when I looked at the things I love about Rebecca, I started to think about how Hitchcock could have expanded on some of them in a different setting at a different time. So this week's double feature is less about what this film does, and more about what I'd loved to have seen the director do to build off of it later in his career. Here are some of the factors that played into this double feature pick.

• Hitch is known as a master of suspense, but very few of his films fit into the traditional definition of the horror genre. The ones that do - most notably Psycho and The Birds - are widely regarded as being among the best the genre has to offer. Sometimes I get a little greedy considering what it would have been like if the director dove into the genre a little more often.
• Hitchcock gained a lot of control over his films after his contract with Selznick ended in 1947, and also became more of a risk taker as he moved through the final couple of decades of his career. It's easy to wonder what a man of Hitchcock's mindset could have done with more time working after the Hays Code ended (it was replaced by the MPAA rating system in 1968 after being ignored for most of the 1960s) and filmmakers were given more freedom to tell riskier stories on screen.
• I mentioned similarities between Hitchcock and William Castle, possibly the two most larger than life showmen in genre cinema history. Hitchcock managed to make us feel the tension of a haunting inside Manderley, so I wonder what he could have done with a more traditional haunted house story.There would probably be some similarities with Castle's work, but I also think Hitchcock would have been willing to make a haunted house film that's a little darker and more adult-themed.
• Random tangent: Within Hitchcock's own filmography, the next closest thing to a haunted house film is obviously Psycho. Though very little of the film actually happens in the iconic house on the hill above the Bates Motel, it's still the place that Norman Bates' demons - most notably, Mother - call home. There's another way of telling that story that sure could have felt like a cross between Rebecca and a William Castle chiller, but most people would probably agree with me when I say the way Hitchcock handled Psycho worked out pretty darn well.

Now let's jump ahead 33 years, and take a look at how much different the world Hitchcock was making films in had become.

The Legend of Hell House

1973, Directed by John Hough

In 1972, Hitchcock released his next to last film, Frenzy. It was the first R rated film of his career, and it had enough on screen violence that Roger Ebert called it "Psycho without the shower curtain." For the time - and especially for the director, who was usually more playful with his murders - it was a brutal film about a rapist and killer on the loose in London. Films like Psycho and Marnie - a late career film in which Hitchcock featured an implied rape - had given us a taste for what Hitchcock could be willing to do after the pesky Hays Code was dead. But Frenzy was the first time he put the violence and deviance he'd always hinted at front and center in one of his films.

Which leads me to the film I think a Hitchcock haunted house film of the 1970s would have looked like - The Legend of Hell House. Released a year after Frenzy, it's a perverse and violent adaptation of Richard Matheson's Hell House that drew a PG rating despite a whole bunch of violence toward women and talk about orgies and a candy coating of pure dread that makes every minute of the picture a little bit more sinister than the last. Like Rebecca, many of the sexual elements of the novel had to be toned down for this film, yet the final product still manages to top off its horror setting with a tone that's pretty kinky for 1973.

The connections between Rebecca and The Legend of Hell House as full films are pretty superficial, but there's something to be said for the Hell House of the title as a more vile version of Manderley. As four characters spend several days in the deserted house, we quickly realize there's a gender swap at the center of the house's power. The late Rebecca is replaced here by the unseen Emeric Belasco, a twisted millionaire who towered over the mansion and hosted depraved parties before disappearing after a massacre that took place in his house.

It might be unfair to draw a parallel between a fictional sadist and a real world director who was notorious for being cruel to actors and actresses, but I get the feeling Hitchcock would have had a lot of fun with a character like Belasco haunting one of his films. Much like Hitchcock, director John Hough (working from a screenplay adapted by Matheson himself) spends much of the film putting the female leads that walk into Hell House in stressful and vicious situations.

The first of these women is Florence Tanner, a spiritual medium played by Pamela Franklin. She's interested in the specific entities that are in the house, and ends up focusing her attention on what she believes is the ghost of Belasco's son, Daniel. She's a rather direct young woman, especially considering the situation she's walked into, and some of her optimistic and matter-of-fact reactions to things in the house remind us of some of the more innocent women in Hitchcock's canon, like Barbara Bel Geddes' Midge from Vertigo or his daughter Patricia's Barbara Morton in Strangers on a Train. Hitchcock often had mercy on characters like her, but at this point in his career he was breaking a lot of the rules he had once established.

The other female character featured in The Legend of Hell House is Ann Barrett, played by Gayle Hunnicutt, and she's the character Hitchcock really would have had fun with. She finds herself in the house simply because she's the devoted wife of the man in charge of the investigation, and the house quickly latches on to her. The only reasons for this that the film allows us to assume are a) she's a woman and b) she's sexually frustrated.

One of the film's most intense moments occurs when Ann, possessed by the primal spirits of the house, throws herself at the male character in the film who's not her husband. She grinds her teeth and sweats all over the screen and growls about how much fun it would be if the people in the house all - for lack of a better term - got freaky. And she's very convincing about it. Mrs. Danvers' character came with an implied sexual relation to Rebecca, but the portrayal of the possessed Ann here feels like a moment where all the rules that held Hitchcock back in 1940 have been thrown out the window and replaced by a moment of untethered lust.

The closest thing we have to the second Mrs. DeWinter here is physical medium Ben Fischer, played by the great Roddy McDowall. While the house physically torments the women that enter it, Fischer is the character whose sanity is most blatantly attacked by the house. Fischer is the sole survivor of a previous investigation at Hell House, and his psychic connection to it makes him an easy target. Ben and Florence are clearly more dangerous to Belasco and Hell House than the leader of the expedition, who just wants to wipe the house clean with a giant ghost vacuum machine (I'm pretty sure that's not the technical term, but it's what I'm going with), and Fischer's restrained approach while facing the house makes him the character in the film who needs to step up if he's going to make it out of Hell House alive.

It's hard to see Hitchcock spending as much time on the spiritual and scientific aspects of The Legend of Hell House as this film does; both of these themes were often bumped out of his work in the name of adventure and escapism. But The Legend of Hell House has such a playful psychology toward its characters that I really wish I could see what Hitchcock would have done with them near the end of his career. He might have made a more playful version of the film - perhaps sacrificing some of the dread for a more direct threat - but I think he would have enjoyed the similarities between this film's ending and the endings of Rebecca and Psycho, each of which feature a surprising revelation about the unseen force that haunts the film.

Like I said at the beginning - I'm taking a big leap of faith about my favorite director's approach to filmmaking with this double feature. But it makes sense that a man who once said "I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks" would've jumped at the opportunity to make a haunted house film that was more aggressive than a Selznick produced melodrama ever could be. Rebecca shows us how Hitchcock was able to make a novel about a second wife feel like a kind of haunted house story, and The Legend of Hell House makes me dream about what a purely Hitchcockian haunted house story could be. It might not be the double feature anyone expected, but if it's a choice that shocks you then I'm glad I could provide one too.

Volume 2 - Get Out and the Conversations We Need To Have

Last week we had some fun with some horror movies, this week we're starting with horror again. (If you haven't met me, you'll learn to expect that they'll come up a few times.) Gotta admit though - I'm really nervous about writing this piece. Based on who I am and what I've experienced in life, I can't possibly know what I'm talking about here. I thought about that a lot when I was considering this double feature, and I almost didn't do it. But sometimes the conversations we need to have are not the most comfortable ones, and sometimes the things we mean to say are more important than the mistakes we might make trying to say them.

That said, I'll leave one last warning up front. The things I am about to say will be said in the best way I can based on my experiences and the knowledge I have from my life. If the terms I use are insensitive or poorly chosen, please let me know. I am trying to do the right thing, I'm just not sure I'm the person to do it.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

I don't need to spend a lot of time talking about the movie we're starting with this week; everyone else in the film world and lots of audiences have already done that for me. It's one of the most well-reviewed movies of the year, and it's a flick I think will stick around for a long, long time.

Get Out

2017, Directed by Jordan Peele

I've already put my cards on the table, so I'll say this in a real simple way: I love Get Out a lot. I think it's one of the best horror movies ever made, and I'm not the kind of person who says something new is one of the best somethings ever made often. I buy new jeans more often than I find new favorites, and y'all should see some of the ratty jeans I wear. This is not what I do. And yet, here I am, doing it.

If you're one of the people out there that hasn't seen it or doesn't know about it yet, here's the quick summary of what you need to know about the film. A young African-American man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), goes to the home of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to meet her family. Things there...are not what they seem.

That's it. That's all I want to say. You may be picturing something like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner - a film Peele lists as an influence on his film (more on that in a bit) - but there's a whole lot more "not what they seem" in this film than a difficult Spencer Tracy and a racist maid. The biggest joy in watching Get Out is seeing how it tackles this racial divide and finding out what the twist Peele has waiting for us is. 

The central theme of Get Out is best summed up by Peele's own words. In an interview to promote the film for Crave Online, Peele was asked what scares him the most. His answer, posted below, has a lot to do with the movie I picked for this double feature.

People. I think, and it goes to this whole horror thesis I hope I get to explore, but there's nothing that's scarier than what people are capable of when we get together. The way we can use fear, the way we can scapegoat, the way we can value those closer to ourselves more than we value people further from ourselves, or the other. I think human beings together are capable of the greatest things on Earth but also capable of the biggest atrocities.

Get Out hammers home that point. It manages to do so in an entertaining manner, balancing the injustices people are capable of with impressive comic and dramatic moments and a neat little horror/sci-fi twist. So, where can we go from there? Here's what I was thinking when I started looking for a double feature partner for this one.

• Peele has coined Get Out, and the next several films he plans to make, as "social thrillers." One of the coolest things I've seen in a long time is that, ahead of the release of Get Out, the Brooklyn Academy of Music allowed him to program a series of films entitled The Art of the Social Thriller. Through this 12 film series, he paired his film up with greats like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Rear Window (my personal favorite movie ever!), The 'Burbs, and more. Go ahead and click on that link and look at that list of films. It's beautiful, man. So...I couldn't use any of those films here. Dude stole my thunder. Thanks a lot, Jordan.
• As the quote above states, the scariest thing about Get Out is the human element of it all. At the center of the film are people. People who don't think Chris' life is valuable. People who get together and have their own way. Unfortunately, we need another movie that features people like that - even if it makes the double feature a little less pleasant.
• Before Get Out, Peele was most known for his time in comedy. As the co-star of Comedy Central's groundbreaking Key & Peele, Peele spent five years making people laugh and pushing the limits of comedy, while also dealing with plenty of issues like racism and homophobia. He wasn't the person you'd expect to make a movie that challenges what we think and what we believe about each other - and yet his willingness to challenge viewers helped him become the perfect person for that film. We need another director like that.
• Above all else, the thing that excites me about Get Out is how much it got people who had seen it talking. I can't sum that all up in one bullet point, so let's have a quick personal talk before we get to our other movie.

Hi. My name's Mike, and I am a white man. More than that, I'm a white man who grew up in a place where there were only white people. It was the '80s and the '90s, and that was just how things were there. For the most part, it still is.

The only black - that's the word we used then, because that's the word we were taught - people I knew were on TV or in sports. I never really thought about them as different than me, and I was never really told they were different than me, but the older I got I just started to notice that people around me - and thus, me - talked about them a little differently. And yeah, people used the n-word. It was thrown around in jokes sometimes, just because it could be. 

Perhaps the weirdest encounter of my life happened when I was a young adult. I had gone to college and stayed in my college town after graduation; I was now a "city boy." One day, I was home for a gathering with my extended family. I had a pair of black tennis shoes - cheap ones, I'm not the kind of guy who's rocking any Jordans - and for no reason, other than the fact I thought it didn't matter, I had replaced the worn out black shoelaces with some white ones. If this sounds like one of the smallest decisions I've ever made in my life, that's because that's what it was to me. Yet, as I wandered through a totally normal setting with people I've known my entire life, someone I was walking by said, our of nowhere, "Did you get those white shoelaces from one of the blacks over there?"

I still have no idea why the color of my shoelaces mattered, or how it represented the African-American community, and - I'll be honest - I was far too dumbfounded by the question to even reply to it.  I realize that this is one of the smallest incidents of racism in the history of racism - I've seen much worse, believe me - but it just struck me as the most bizarre comment I'd ever heard in my life. And it made me fully realize...that's how some people think when they've only learned from their own community. Sometimes they are taught things and they teach their children things and the cycle just goes on. And most of the time they don't even talk about it.

Nowadays, I work directly with people of many races and colors, but I still live a mere 25 miles from my hometown in a "city" of about 60,000 people on a school day. It's not a huge shift - this is still a 90%+ white community - but it's something. And when I talked to some of those people about Get Out, I got the biggest smile on my face. I was never in a place where we had actual conversations about race issues with someone, outside of the basic lessons about slavery and The Civil War we had in school. I don't blame my parents or close friends and family for that - I know all of them to be people who would stand up with the same opinions I have if they were confronted this issue - but it's so weird to look back and think about the unspoken beliefs people had back then. I wish we had more movies like this, movies that made us think about our belief systems and made us ask questions and start conversations about life.

Like I said, I know this is a totally white story about racism. But it's mine, and it makes me want to help people who might want to have these conversations get to that point. So let's get to that double feature....

The Intruder

1962, Directed by Roger Corman

I'm really excited that today's audiences have a film like Get Out that can get them talking about race issues. The film I wish I had seen when I was younger, that would have helped me to be more understanding of the dangers of groupthink and stereotypes, is Roger Corman's The Intruder.

Like Peele, Corman - a master of pulpy schlock that covered everything from Edgar Allan Poe to Crab Monsters - doesn't seem like the guy you'd expect to make a statement about how we live with each other and how minorities face challenges being accepted as who they are. Yet here he was in 1962, teaming up with author Charles Beaumont and a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, to create a film that tackled the white reaction to the integration of schools in the South without compromising one bit.

The Intruder is the story of Adam Cramer (Shatner), a young white man who rolls into a fictional town telling those he meets that he's a "social worker" and that he's "come to do what I can for the town." In fact, what he's come to do is stop the town from accepting a small group of African-American teenagers into its all white high school. And it really doesn't take him much work for him to get most of the white people in town on his side.

Bragging about his membership in the Patrick Henry Society (I googled it, it's real) and repeating "Whose law?" whenever someone reminds him that United States law has already decided that the schools will accept these students is enough to get Cramer in the door with most of the townspeople. We quickly see that they are generally opposed to integration, especially when it takes less than four minutes of the film before a little old lady drops a casual "nigger" in conversation. Much like my personal experience, she uses the term toward a white man who just happens to not be meeting her standards. This town is living that same belief that there's something different about white and black people - but unlike my childhood, this was a time when these comments were rarely held back.

While Cramer is busy giving speeches on the courthouse steps and reminding the town's richest man that "democracy is the collective will of the people," there seems to be only a couple of men in town who are willing to stand up against him. The guy I really like is Tom, the head of the town newspaper, who at one point admits to his wife that he is, in fact, in favor of the integration of schools. She responds with shock, because that's just not the way people in that town think, and when she asks him why he's never told her this he gives the perfect response to sum up his realization.

"Because I didn't know. I don't think I really knew til now. One thing Adam Cramer's done for us...he's made us face ourselves."

If this sounds a little like The Twilight Zone, that's because Beaumont - who adapted his own novel for Corman after the studios that bought the rights chickened out on making the film - wrote 22 episodes of that show and knew exactly how to point out the dark side of human nature. But there's no disclaimer from Rod Serling here; this is our world and our reality. As the film builds to a finale that's full of lies, threats, and all kinds of mob mentality, The Intruder becomes a gut-wrenching film to watch. 

Random note, because this post hasn't been long enough, I freakin' love this kid that co-starred in The Intruder. His name is Charles Barnes, and Corman picked him for a central role because he was a student and football player at a school that was integrated the previous year. He didn't bother finding an actor in Hollywood for the role, he just told Barnes to go with what he experienced and work from that. And the kid nails it. So good.

I don't think this would be an easy double feature to watch - you're definitely going to want to watch The Intruder first and end with Get Out, both for tone and timeline reasons - but I think it's an incredibly important one. Both Beaumont and Peele knew how dangerous people can be when they start thinking the wrong way, and both films can be necessary conversation starters.

I've never told that story about my shoelaces before. Partially because it's such a small incident, but also because it's just not comfortable to talk about these issues. Yet, the only way we can get stronger and smarter and braver in our world is to challenge ourselves to do it. Maybe watching The Intruder will help people see how things used to be, and maybe watching Get Out can help them see how things still are today. Maybe if we look at these things, and talk about these things, we can help change the lives of people who don't understand the racism that lives in their community. 

Maybe there are better ways to do it, but for me it's the movies that speak loudest. And if these movies can make me think more, it's my duty to recommend them to others too. That's a chance worth taking.