The New Classics: Drive

By Michael Cusumano 

Scene: Elevator
When people talk about missing the communal experience of movie theaters, it’s moments like the elevator sequence in Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-bathed synth-noir, that come to mind. I can vividly recall the total silence as time slowed down to let Ryan Gosling’s never-named Driver live in his stolen kiss with Carey Mulligan's Irene a few moments longer, just as I can recall the sound of the oxygen rapidly exiting the screening after the gut punch transition back into real time, when Driver dispatched his would be assassin and then just. kept. stomping...

Click to read more ...

The New Classics: Moonlight

By Michael Cusumano 

Scene: Kevin and Black at the Diner
We consider Trevante Rhodes’s Black carefully throughout the last act of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, searching for traces of the younger versions of his character. That we don’t find many is not surprising considering how we’ve seen this child get battered and abused by life. Chiron doesn’t grow from segment to segment so much as he transforms as survival demands. Moonlight’s second movement ends on such a violent act of self-annihilation, we should be surprised to spot any remnant of the adolescent in Black when he walks into Kevin’s diner a decade later. 

And yet despite the intimidating presence Black developed as a barrier against the world, the aspect that unmistakably connects him with his teenage self, and to Little before that, is his fragility. All his outward defenses - the bulked up physique, the sullen manner - hang on him like an ill-fitting suit of armor. When he is in the presence of Andre Holland’s Kevin it looks a stiff breeze would blow him over...

Click to read more ...

The New Classics: Lincoln

By Michael Cusumano 

Abraham Lincoln abilities as a writer probably would have earned him a place in history even without his accomplishments as a statesman. He is surely the best writer that has ever occupied the Oval Office. Capable of expressing complex ideas with remarkable economy, he had a deft hand with allusions and was responsible for many evocative turns of phrase that resonate far outside the political context of their time, “The better angels of our nature” or “The dogmas of the quiet past”.  Hell, simply opting for “Four score and seven” over “eighty-seven” reveals a writer’s ear for the musical potential of language.

It's a fitting tribute then, that the most prominent film about the sixteenth president, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, with a screenplay by Pulitzer prize winning playwright Tony Kushner, exudes that same love of language. There’s scarcely a scene without some memorable linguistic spin. There's much to admire in Spielberg’s film from the beautifully worn production design to the momentous performances, but the real reason I’ve returned to it repeatedly since 2012 is simply because the characters are such fun to listen to. All of the film’s dramatic peaks involve the spectacle of verbal fireworks, particularly my favorite scene, where Tommy Lee Jones blasts his way out of a political trap firing off ornately worded insults like cannonballs... 

Click to read more ...

The New Classics: Wonder Boys

By Michael Cusumano 

Scene: The Suicide List
Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys understand that writers are often their own most carefully crafted creations. You can often catch the writers in the film pausing to appreciate when they hit upon just the right turn of phrase. Life doesn’t allow for second drafts. So very satisfying to nail it on the first. 

By understanding the way writers reveal themselves through narrative shapes into which they attempt to force their lives, Wonder Boys solves the age-old problem of making writing cinematic. We never hear a word of Grady Tripp’s prose that gets blown away at the film’s end, but after we spend two hours stumbling through the shambolic mess of his life, it feels superfluous. His life is already one long, run-on sentence crying out for an editor’s red pen...

Click to read more ...

The New Classics: The New World

Michael Cusumano here, kicking off our intermittent 2005 coverage for the next few weeks. This episode of The New Classics can be subtitled "Confessions of a Former Malick Agnostic."

Scene: Reunion in England
For most of my life, Terrence Malick films have been like going to church in that I respect the showmanship while being privately unmoved as, all around me, believers are moved to heights of ecstasy. Like any good lapsed Catholic, I felt tremendously guilty about this. If only I wasn’t so spiritually deficient, so hung up on traditional plot structure, then I wouldn’t be a Philistine who preferred Private Ryan to Thin Red Line (twenty lashes for being basic). True, I adored Badlands but that only increased my shame. Of course I would go for his most accessible one. What, is "Creep" my favorite Radiohead song, too?

My first viewing of The New World followed the usual script...

Click to read more ...