Deleted Scenes from The Town

According to the always reliable IMDB, the original cut of Ben Affleck's The Town was four-hours long. Clearly, this wasn't going to be workable, so the movie was trimmed to a more accessible 125 minutes. Given the movie's faithful rendition of Boston and the overall tone, I think we can easily imagine what those extra 115 minutes may be:

• Four separate scenes totaling 20 minutes of the gang cursing the ineptitude of the Red Sox bullpen and its use by manager Terry Francona. In one of the intermediate cuts, these scenes were edited down to a montage of Affleck repeatedly saying "re-tah-ded" for a full minute.
• A fifteen minute scene of Affleck driving his enormous Avalanche SUV around Charlestown trying to find street parking in the evening. Sample dialogue: "Another fucking hydrant! Motherfucker!"
• A ten-minute wordless and completely unexplained scene of Jon Hamm thougtfully sipping scotch and smoking a cigarette in his FBI office scored to a medley of 1964 pop hits.
• A five-minute sequence of the Rebecca Hall yuppie character walking with Affleck's townie character in Whole Foods. Affleck continuously asks what things are and whether people really pay so much for that shit.
• A ten-minute montage sequence showing Chris Cooper's participation in the annual Mooks vs. Micks softball game at MDC-Walpole.
• Fifteen different scenes totaling five minutes of cops either going in or hanging out at Dunkin' Donuts that were to be used as bumpers between scenes. Once the film was cut down to two hours, they went with only the aerial shots instead.
• A rambling ten minute barroom discussion where the gang agrees that, while they are not at all gay, they totally would blow Tom Brady.
• Ten more minutes of Affleck working out to show how buff he got for this film.
• Fifteen minutes of the gang stuck in traffic on Memorial Drive coming back from a job in Cambridge. Luckily for them, the cops are stuck as well.
• Fifteen minutes of Ben Affleck running down Lou Merloni's career in front of the gang, just to be a dick.

Clearly, the movie benefited from deleting this scenes. I'm sure we can look forward to seeing them eventually on the director's cut DVD.

Using Disney's works to explain copyright

This Business of Show

So some dude is making a film about the Replacements called Color Me Obsessed. The gimmick is that he is partially funding it with money raised from the general public. There are, of course, a number of contribution levels. For a mere $30, you get a "Special thanks to" listing in the film and a DVD of the finished product. For $500, you will get listed as an Associate Producer and be included in the film's currently non-existent IMDB page. For $2,000, you will be an Executive Producer, have your story about the Replacements included in the film and be invited to the film's premiere, presumably to be held in Minneapolis (or St. Paul.)

I'm thinking I need to put in at least $30 for this thing. Unless we decide to start TNPP Films, in which case we can pitch in $50 and get the 11" x 17" poster for our production office.

Eight Fragments for Jim Carroll

I

Unlike your average published poet, Jim Carroll was a high-school basketball star in New York City in the 60s. It's how he got a scolarship to a posh Catholic school (there are such things apparently) and how he was, as mentioned in The Basketball Diaries, excited to be playing in a national all-star game because Lewie Alcindor from the neighborhood would also be playing. He certainly would have been a starter in college had he not had other plans. Like heroin.

II

Carroll makes one of the best arguments for drug education. In The Basketball Diaries he mentions thinking that pot was addictive while heroin was not. He did say no to drugs, just the wrong one.

III

His first rock album, Catholic Boy, is one of the greatest punk rock records ever released. Half of the songs are awesome (People Who Died, Catholic Boy, It's Too Late, Nothing is True and Three Sisters) and the rest are okay. I love how in the title track he lists how he has had all the sacraments including EXTREME UNCTION, because he's that much of a badass. The album is so perfect that there was no place to go but down. While he recorded another three discs, none is considered to be nearly as good.

IV

People Who Died has poetic lyrics in the best sense, not in the bullshit poetry-slam sense. This makes it really fun to sing. For instance take this couplet:

G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan

The repeated Gs and Rs in the first line and the repeated Ts in the second line provide the rhythm, while rotten and Manhattan are actually perfectly rhymed if you say them as Carroll does without the annoying vowels between the Ts and Ns. It also tells you a lot about the particular situation once you figure out that gimmicks means heroin paraphernalia.

V

Good as Catholic Boy is, The Basketball Diaries is really Carroll's biggest accomplishment. The diary was written while he was still in high school and published when he was 30 in 1978. It is an endlessly re-readable book, mostly because it's really a collection of dozens of perfectly-crafted anecdotes. His follow-up diary, Forced Entries about living in Manhattan in the early 70s is also a great read.

VI

The Basketball Diaries was optioned for film repeatedly from its release to its actual production in 1995. I suspect he made way more money from all the film options than from anything else he ever did.

VII

The movie fails for two reasons: it was predictably turned into an anti-drug message and almost every single character has a bigger presence than star Leonardo DiCaprio. It's hard to suspend disbelief when the guy who's a hoop star/published poet/junkie is about 5' 5", looks about 12 and comes across as a wimp. Among the people who come across better than DiCaprio in this movie are Lorraine Bracco (Melfi, sure), Bruno Kirby (a character actor), Ernie Hudson (another one), Mark Wahlberg (weird, but it was the first hint that he wasn't totally useless), Juliette Lewis (what?!) and Jim Carroll himself (his cameo is pretty awesome actually.)

VIII

There is a good argument to be made that Jim Carroll was the last of the American popular poets (Jewel doesn't count.) As far as poetry goes, this is his best known piece.

Reviews of Random Movies

Thanks to the magic of digital video recording and one-day solo business trips to New York, I've seen three movies worth commenting on.

Diary of the Dead

The latest George Romero zombie flick is a worthwhile addition to the series. As is traditional, the movie cost nothing, stars no one and never mentions the word "zombie." Although the story is set in Pennsylvania, it was filmed in Ontario. The gore is very good, perhaps most memorably when a feisty deaf Amish geezer reacts to being bitten by driving a sickle through his face and that of the zombie standing behind him. The requisite social commentary is how these kids today with their youtubes and their facebooks care more about capturing images than actually reacting to them. Stupid kids.

One, Two, Three

From 1961, this frantic Billy Wilder comedy stars James Cagney as Coca-Cola's man in West Berlin. The Iron Curtain humor seems nostalgically cute at this point, although it was very cutting-edge at the time (the Berlin Wall went up as the film was being shot.) Most importantly it shows how to properly make references: Cagney's office cuckoo clock plays Yankee Doodle Dandy and he later threatens to ram a grapefruit in Horst Buchholz's face. See Tarantino, that's how it's done.

Summer Hours

I went to the craziest place in New York: they actually charge money to project a movie, like you normally would watch on a TV or laptop, on a white screen. Weirdest thing I've seen. Don't think it will ever catch on.

Anyway, this is guaranteed to be the most mesmerizing French movie about estate law you could ever see. A great decaying country mansion, lush gardens, authentic Impressionist artwork, heartfelt emotions, eloquent conversations and how to avoid French estate taxes by donating articles to the Musee d'Orsay; the movie has it all. The only distraction is Juliette Binoche's blonde hair. Seriously, it's wrong. It's almost as distracting as when Xena appears as a blonde.

The Best Films/Movies of My Lifetime, Part 3 (89-98)

The first and second installments of the series were pretty close to the established film canon with some exceptions. I suspect this one will diverge more.

1989
Looking through the list, there weren't a lot of great "movies" released this year. The better ones include Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, When Harry Met Sally... and Say Anything. The best one may be Weird Al Yankovic's masterpiece: UHF. Yes, a flick featuring an ad for Spatula City was probably the best movie of the year.

The film side, on the other hand, was loaded: Mystery Train, Heathers and Sex, lies and videotape. Much as Soderbergh's debut still holds up well, no film that year could top Do The Right Thing. It is quite likely that Spike Lee will never make a better non-documentary film.

1990
This year saw a lot of interesting movies. King of New York has an awesome Christopher Walken performance. Total Recall has ridiculous sets, a chick with three boobs and a fun convoluted plot. Gremlins 2 takes what should have been a crappy sequel of a mediocre fantasy movie and turns it into a funny satire on Ted Turner and Donald Trump.

However, the obvious best film of the year was also its best movie, the endlessly rewatchable Goodfellas. While it seemed kind of dumb picking the obviously inferior Dances With Wolves for best picture at the time, it seems completely insane now. What, you think I'm funny? Funny how?

1991
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey actually improved on the original, the whole idea of playing Twister with Death is still funny as hell. Terminator 2 gets pretty close to bettering the original, simply because the larger budget allows for more stuff getting blow'd up. The best movie, and that's really all it is, was The Silence of the Lambs.

Boyz N the Hood, Slacker and Night on Earth are good films in stretches but are too uneven. The best film is thus Delicatessen which combines an intriguing plot, innovative visuals and the rubbery features of Dominique Pinon into a great French take on the it's-the-future-and-everything-sucks genre.

1992
This was a bit of a crappy year for movies as I have no desire to revisit some of the better ones like Singles and Reservoir Dogs. The best movie, The Player, still holds up pretty well even if they did end up making a sequel (of sorts) to The Graduate.

On the other hand it was a great year for films. Bob Roberts is still a realistic depiction of a conservative manipulating rebellious imagery. Thankfully that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. Glengarry Glen Ross captured exactly the essence of one of my previous employers, except for the whole Alec Baldwin bit. Malcolm X is actually a pretty impressive portrayal and Denzell is solid as usual. The best film, though, was Unforgiven, which in a just world should have been the last Western ever made.

1993
Two absolute classic movies were released this year. I've watched Addams Family Values dozens of times and it is still funny. The sequel more than made up for the boring original. Every single day I turn on the TV and Groundhog Day is playing. With good reason: it is fantastic (even if it stars notorious non-entity Andie MacDowell.)

I'm certain that Schindler's List is a significant film achievement and all, but who is ever in the mood for a three-hour black-and-white film about the Holocaust? Not me. Short Cuts is interesting but inconsistent and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? is pretty well done too. The best film of the year is thus Dazed and Confused, one of the best recent depictions of the 70s experience featuring a great soundtrack and Matthew McConaughey in his signature role.

1994

No matter how well-filmed or edited, Pulp Fiction is basically a movie. It wasn't even the best movie made that year, as Serial Mom is even more enjoyable. You can have your stupid conversations about Scottish restaurants in Paris, I'll stick with famous heiresses being beaten to death with a phone for daring to wear white shoes after Labor Day. Honorable mention to the relentlessly stupid yet rewatchable PCU.

The finest film of the year was Ed Wood. Cut, print it!

1995
Two fantastic movies were released this year, the kind that make you glad that studios try to make crowd-pleasing projects every so often. Get Shorty stars a fat Scientologist and seemingly every awesome character actor available (Hackman, Farina, Gandolfini, Sandoval.) Slightly better is The Usual Suspects which was probably the peak of Kevin Spacey 90s hot streak and is actually still rewatchable even after knowing the ending.

Scorsese's Casino was excellent but paled in comparison to Goodfellas. My selection for best film was Almodovar's The Flower of My Secret, which tones down the wacky comedy and pumps up the melodrama in his usual formula. This gets bonus points from me for realistically portraying overly dramatic families. Not that I would know or anything.

1996
The movie choices for this year were pretty crappy except for the unfairly maligned Mars Attacks! which finally fulfills the audience's desire to see numerous movie stars die horrible deaths and shows a utopian fantasy of a world repopulated by the likes of James Brown, Pam Grier and Tom Jones.

The film side is much tougher. A strong debut like Bottle Rocket wasn't even one of the top two films of the year. The wacky but intelligent Schizopolis is the rare experimental film that holds together and is enjoyable. It is truly a miracle that a movie with a character named simply Nameless Numberhead Man could be any good. The best film was Trainspotting even though it was made in some incomprehensible dialect.

1997
This year saw the realease of two consistently funny comedies: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Waiting for Guffman. In most years, either would have been a fine choice. But this year saw the release of the even funnier The Fifth Element, the first (and likely last) big-budget gay sci-fi epic starring Bruce Willis.

L.A. Confidential is a strong retro film noir. Boogie Nights is funny, scary and always entertaining. Burt Reynolds' dad has never been better. But the best film was Spain's Abre los Ojos, an engrossing and challenging sci-fi film on a much tighter budget that the best movie of the year.

1998
Ronin was a rare case: an intelligent and exciting action movie. It is hardly a match for Out of Sight. It has a great cast, loads of comedy, fast-paced action and is beautifully shot. It is about as good as a mainstream movie can be.

I loved Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, particularly Depp and Del Toro's mumbled and slurred conversations. But Rushmore was a career high point for Wes Anderson and firmly established Bill Murray as the face of dramatic middle-age angst today.

Next time: Wait, I have to cover 2008? But I haven't been to the movies all year!

The Best Films/Movies in My Lifetime, Part 2 (79-88)

In the first part of this series I covered the best movies and films from '69 to '78. Given that I saw very few of these movies at the time they were released, the pool of choices was more limited. After all, I'm not likely to dig up a movie that everybody pretty much agrees is kind of bad (like say Airport) unless it's so horrible that I have to watch it (like say Sextette.) So when I looked through the list of movies for any given year, I had only seen a handful and most were pretty good.

This next stretch is different as I saw a ton of movies at the time, then went back and saw all the cult/art movies afterwards when I went to college and became an arugula-eating elitist. With that in mind, here are the best movies and films from 1979 to 1988:

1979
The movie choices are pretty diverse: Alien, the best anti-pregnancy movie since Rosemary's Baby; the slowly-becoming-completely-plausible Mad Max; the ludicrous stylings of The Warriors; and the lovingly rendered barnyard miscegenation of The Muppet Movie. However, the best movie was Rock 'n' Roll High School for realistically depicting a fantasy universe in which cute high school chicks were really into The Ramones.

The film choices come down to three. Quadrophenia is a gritty depiction of teenage alienation and all that, plus it naturally has an awesome soundtrack. Apocalypse Now is an unhinged war film based on a classic story and features our future first Mexican President. But time has been kindest to Being There, as the idea of platitude-spouting being confused with depth runs rampant through the country and our political system.

1980
With apologies to The Long Good Friday, which loses a lot of points for presenting the Irish as scary, the choice for best movie comes down to two influential comedies. The Blues Brothers featured R&B legends (Ray Charles, Aretha, Cab Calloway), famed directors (Spielberg, Frank Oz, John Landis) and serious drug addicts (Belushi, Carrie Fisher, James Brown.) Half of Chicago was seemingly destroyed during its shooting and damn if it didn't seem worthwhile. Still, for better or worse, Airplane! is a huge step forward in getting to the gag-a-second directing style we see in the better comedies today.

Before I get to the best film of the year, I would like to state for the record that I did not, at any time, fuck Jake LaMotta's wife. So yes, it's Raging Bull.

1981
Best movie is an easy choice as Raiders of the Lost Ark is fantastic entertainment. On completely different ends of the spectrum, Escape from New York and Mommie Dearest are also a lot of fun.

Best film is a more difficult choice as there are less noteworthy selections. My memory is that Das Boot taught me never, ever to enlist in the Navy so that is my pick.

1982
There were some strong movie choices this year. Tootsie was amusing, although I'd be damned if I understand how it can be considered the second best American comedy ever. It's only marginally better than Airplane II: The Sequel. Also noteworthy is Fast Times at Ridgemont High and its introduction of famous serious actor Jeff Spicolli. But I guess it would be silly not to select E.T. the Extra Terrestrial since I thought it was TEH AWESOME when it came out. Of course, I was 13.

This is another year where I haven't seen a lot of the film choices. I'm going to go with The Verdict as Newman was fantastic, although not Slapshot-level fantastic.

1983
This year brought us Saturday-afternoon-TNT classics like Risky Business, Easy Money, The Dead Zone and A Christmas Story. None of these furthered our understanding of financial matters as much as Trading Places did. Besides giving us the Mortimer Bet and a peek at blind-pouch breasts, it also taught us everything we needed to know about the commodity futures market.

In the film side I prefer the low-key silliness of Local Hero over Sandra Bernhard's one justification for existence The King of Comedy.

1984
A movie like The Terminator is more than qualified to be the best movie of the year. It is entertaining, contains iconic quotes and shows loads of stuff getting blow'd up. Unfortunately, it was released the same year as the classic comedy of This Is Spinal Tap. If only James Cameron had gone to eleven...

The film side was strong as well with Amadeus, which would have been better with an all-Falco soundtrack, and Once Upon a Time in America, which is still the greatest four-hour film about a mobster named Noodles ever made. The best film of the year (yes, film) was the fast-paced, extremely-quotable and always rewatchable Repo Man.

1985
This year produced some entertaining movies of various types like Day of the Dead, Pale Rider and Real Genius. Of course as children are repeatedly taught in school, this was the year in which the greatest teen movie ever was released: Better Off Dead. As you all know Savage Steve Holland magnum opus swept the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion and the Academy Awards that year. With no other K-12s to scale in motion pictures, SSH gave up filmmaking and dedicated himself to the more challenging medium of children's television programming.

While the brilliance of Better Off Dead is unquestioned, it is most definitely also true that it is not Shakespeare. Kurosawa's Ran is Shakespeare. King Lear in fact. The film is a visually stunning, violent, moving spectacle.

1986
Aliens is more fast-paced than its predecessor while still being tense. It has Paul Reiser in it, which docks it a few points. Back to School on the other hand has both Rodney Dangerfield and Sam Kinison, plus Kurt Vonnegut for a throw-away gag. Just Kinison's rant about Vietnam, which McCain is quoting word-for-word on the campaign trail, makes it the best movie of the year.

Many of the best film candidates suffer from tragic flaws. Blue Velvet has terrible performances on both ends of the spectrum from Dennis Hopper and Laura Dern. Platoon has the ham-fisted direction of Oliver Stone. River's Edge has Keanu Reeves and there's only so much Crispin Glover can make up for that. So the best film has to be the Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring combination. They were beautifully shot, perfectly acted and ruined Provence for everybody.

1987
This year featured two remarkably prescient visions of the future. The Running Man successfully predicted the direction of network television: cheap-ass "reality" game shows, while RoboCop showed us the natural end result of privatizing every damn thing: giant killer robots shooting people dead. Even more prescient was my best movie choice The Princess Bride. Since we forgot about the land war in Asia thing, I hope we never have to go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

The best film of the year, and I'm stretching here a bit, is Withnail & I. There may not be a lot of "art" in Richard E. Grant's crazed performance of a drunken drama queen, but it is funny as hell.

1988
Here is a list of some of the movies that could be considered for best movie of 1988: Bull Durham, Hairspray, The Naked Gun and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? All of them would be worthy of the honor. I guess when you are 19 every single movie is targeted exactly at you. My choice is Tapeheads because it is more rewatchable than any of the others. Maybe it's the scene where Tim Robbins states with no emotion whatsoever "look, two ninja bitches about to kill each other" that does it for me.

Films included the excellent Eight Men Out and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. While either would be fine choices, this was the year of Almodovar's Women on The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Next time: the '90s, where I pretty much start skipping every movie that made over $100 million.

The Best Films/Movies in My Lifetime, Part 1 (69-78)

Revisiting an earlier concept but with movies instead of music, here is the first of four lists detailing the best films released in my lifetime. I will try to make a choice for best film (stuff that gets a Criterion release) and best movie (stuff that gets shown on Saturday afternoons on TNT). Anyway, here it is:

1969
The choice for best film comes down to two revisionist Westerns, a genre that was all cutting edge back then. I slightly prefer the long, bloody, depressing The Wild Bunch over the long, bloody and depressing Once Upon a Time in the West. Perhaps more blood would have placed Paint Your Wagon in their company.

Academy Award nominations or not, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid falls on the movie category and would be a fine choice were it not for The Italian Job, which featured absolutely ridiculous car chases and Michael Caine when he was as cool as Newman and Redford combined.

1970
The best motion picture of the year was clearly M*A*S*H, which neatly straddles the line between popular entertainment and art. Robert Altman or not, I think it is basically a movie, since it has an extended (and beautifully filmed) football sequence.

That leaves the best film of the year title to Five Easy Pieces, a somber meditation on Jack Nicholson's inability to get some fucking wholewheat toast. Who can't sympathize with that?

Honorable mention to the stunning Woodstock documentary. If it wasn't for all the filthy hippies, it could have been the best film of the year.

1971
The French Connection had fantastic car chases, random police brutatlity and the smooth villainy of Fernando Rey. It's definitely great, but only the last point differentiates it from Dirty Harry and Dirty Harry is not a film. So best movie it is.

I go back and forth on A Clockwork Orange. One of my problems with Kubrick is evident in this movie: it could have been thirty minutes shorter. Regardless, Malcom McDowell delivers an insanely committed performance and the themes are still relevant, so best film of 1971 it is.

1972
This was a strong year with films as diverse and entertaining as Cabaret, Deliverance and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie being released. But in spite of Joel Grey's brilliance, Ned Beatty's unfortunate encounters and Luis Bunuel's satirical wackiness, the best film of the year was easily The Godfather. There is no point in making a film/movie distinction either as it is both a meditation on the difficulty of escaping a life of crime and a movie that gets referenced as "One" without further explanation in The Sopranos.

1973
Few big-budget movies are as much fun as The Sting, the best movie of 1973. SPOILER ALERT: Neman and Redford get away with it. Other notables include The Exorcist, American Graffiti and The Wicker Man.

While Mean Streets features the most realistic bar fight ever filmed and La Grande Bouffe is European decadence at its finest, High Plains Drifter is just about the weirdest mainstream Western ever. I've never thought of the phrase "paint the town red" the same way again.

1974
Because "One" lacked good actors, they added DeNiro for "Two." So yes, Godfather II is the best movie of 1974. I mean, I like The Longest Yard and all, but really.

I left out best film from the previous paragraph so I could name the shoestring-budgeted, non-linear, utterly-confusing F for Fake as the best film of 1974. Why? Degree of difficulty. Orson Welles made a still-resonant essay about the nature of truth for practically no money while still leaving himself time to gorge on French food and wine. He was awesome.

But then I noticed Chinatown was also released that year. Sorry, fatty, I have to go with the fugitive guy.

1975
Our best film for 1975 is One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest over Dog Day Afternoon. I'm pretty sure those were the two last great performances by Nicholson and Pacino as they slowly started morphing into the cartoonish hams we so enjoy today.

While Jaws was exciting and Tommy was delightfully unhinged, the most prophetic (and enjoyable) movie of 1975 was Rollerball. "Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan!"

1976
While Rocky inexplicably won Best Picture, the best film of the year was easily Taxi Driver over Network. Frankly we're so far past the point of Network being relevant, it's not even funny.

Rocky is a good enough choice for best movie, because laughable as the series became, the original actually felt plausible. Also the main competitors are cheesy horror crap like Carrie and The Omen.

1977
This year saw the first of many releases of a high-grossing nerdfest that still plagues us today. I don't get the appeal, really. Why do people obssess so much about Close Encounters?

Anyway, while Desperate Living is John Waters' best 70s movie, it's not quite up to the standards of Slapshot, a movie that captures the decade better than any documentary could. And it also has Oglethorpe.

The best film of 1977 is That Obscure Object of Desire, featuring Fernando Rey, two actresses playing the same role and random terrorist bombings. That, right there, is an art film.

1978
While Animal House is still quite funny, at least when Belushi is onscreen, it bears a lot of responsibility for all the retarded comedies we see today. So the best movie of the 1978 is Dawn of the Dead. If you're going to satirize consumer culture, you might as well be really unsubtle about it.

The best film of the year was directed by Michael Cimino. This is notable because I am very unlikely to type those words again in this series. The Deer Hunter proves that a stellar cast (DeNiro! Walken! Cazale! Streep!) and the least subtle metaphor for America's involvement in Vietnam can offset an interminable wedding scene and endless shots of rural scenery.

Next time: the '80s, and a debate on whether Better off Dead is a film or a movie.