Some Movies I Vouch For

There are maybe four or five people alive unfortunate enough to know me very well. They know which movies, TV shows, albums, and books I really like. I’ve seen everything, heard a lot of music, and read some books. Here’s what I recommend, divorced from the burden of having to know me well.

MOVIES

The first movie I remember seeing was Clash of the Titans in 1981 when I was 7 years old. I recently tried watching it again. It didn’t do it for me. These movies do it for me on repeated viewings.

THE CONVERSATION (1974)

Picking a favourite movie—or even your five favourite movies—is difficult. They change. You change. While other movies at the top of my list come and go, The Conversation consistently remains my number one. Maybe it’s because it came out the year I was born, and I somehow associate it with the beautiful experience of being granted a human life.

Francis Ford Coppola has occasionally blown it, but he didn’t blow it here. Gene Hackman is perfect as Harry Caul, the moral, romantically unhappy surveillance expert. He plays saxophone, which is charming, and I once read that Coppola included the church confessional scene because confession is a kind of surveillance too—an invasion of privacy pitched as spiritual intimacy.

John Cazale is great here, just as he is a year later in Dog Day Afternoon. Sadly, he died of cancer not long after. Every time I watch the film I’m surprised to see Cindy Williams outside the context of Laverne & Shirley. Paranoia, surveillance, obsession with craft, perfectionism—The Conversation has it all.

GLASS CHIN (2014)

Glass Chin is a neo-noir film about a boxer—Bud Gordon, played by Corey Stoll—being pressured to throw a fight. Bud’s girlfriend is a Buddhist, as is the film’s writer and director Noah Buschel, who was once a contributing editor at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Billy Crudup steals every scene he’s in as some kind of crime boss-slash-entrepreneur-slash-Warhol appreciator named JJ. Crudup can currently be seen chewing up the scenery in The Morning Show, which was good early on, but for the last two seasons has resembled a telenovela about Good Morning America. There’s a scene in Glass Chin involving music blaring in an empty parked car at night that really affects me, that feels violent despite the absence of violence. Yul Vazquez—who robbed Kramer of an armoire in Seinfeld—is also very charismatic as an intimidating, culturally savvy debt collector. I can’t articulate why I like this movie so much, but I like this movie so much.

BEAU TRAVAIL (1999)

This movie is just ridiculously, almost irritatingly beautiful. Galoup—played by Denis Lavant—a retired military officer, chills in retirement in Marseille, reflecting on his past. He remembers his time in Djibouti, living out the plot of Billy Budd. A young soldier named Sentain joins his division. He’s younger, taller, and better-looking, so Galoup vows to ruin his life. We all remember Billy Budd, don’t we? There’s hardly a line of dialogue in the whole film. All the men are gorgeous. It often looks like promotional video for a non-existent Andorran or Cape Verdean fashion label. Galoup keeps fucking with Sentain, we care or don’t care, and each scene is more beautiful than the last. Oh, you’ve never seen a post-apocalyptic, off-Earth looking salt flat, like the one near Lake Assal? I hadn’t either, not until I watched this movie, and the scene depicting objects caked in thick, dry salt blew my mind. I won’t ruin it by describing final scene, which made me feel like someone had reached inside my chest, squeezed my heart, then blown a fat line of cocaine up my nose.

ROMANCING THE STONE (1984)