The Wisdom of our Great Directors

If you haven't had a chance to pick up the 20th Anniversary Edition of Empire, do so. It's very classy and has kept me busy this whole week. It includes reflections from its writers/editors/photographers, the movies that "make" Empire, a Lord of the Rings retrospective, as well as Empire "icons" - actors who grew up or did their most important work during Empire's tenure. One of my favorite feature of the magazine is the "Directors of Our Lifetime", which highlights the best directors and selected quotes from their past interviews with Empire. The list includes: Tarantino, Spielberg, Fincher, Scorsese, Greengrass, Jackson, Coen Bros., Nolan, Boyle, Lucas and more. Here are some of my favorite quotes from some of my favorite directors both of my lifetime and all time.

"A movie like Fight Club is always going to come under attack from fucking pussies... violence between consenting adults is a healthy thing." - David Fincher

"I'm not from the Mike Leigh school. I want to reach the widest audience possible." - Christopher Nolan

"I want every one of my movies, even 20 years down the line, to have the same piss and vinegar, the same hard fucking dick as Reservoir Dogs. There can be no fuck-up, no weak link, no blank in the chamber for the kid to discover." - QT

"There's a point editing a film when you get really tired of it. I never got tired of Goodfellas" - who do you think?

"I don't like the name 'the Movie Brats' that much. I wish they'd called us 'the Movie Nerds'" - Steven Spielberg

and Paul Greengrass names Ken Loach as his favorite director which is awesome.

MSN's Top 10 of 2009

The MSN critics have near impeccable taste. Their list of the top 10 of 2009 will probably be the closest to mine. Much kudos to them putting Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans on their as well as them putting Inglourious Basterds so high. To make it even more legit, they also added the individual lists of their panel of critics. Big props to them putting some of the seriously underrated movies of the year Public Enemies and Observe and Report. Check out both here

Three Tomatoes are Walking Down a Street...

I post in this shit freely. No rules. Never were, never will be. This is my sweet declaration of freedom, like good ol' TJ, breaking more ground than an earthquake or a really fat person walking in a cartoon. I don't know why I get discouraged by the fact that my blog isn't read by multitudes of people. It's not like I gave a shit when the only one reading my diary back in 'nam was my charlie overseer in the prison camp. I still wrote my things down, so I guess I'll continue. Fuck it, whatever.

Anyways, can't believe I haven't posted a response upon my seeing Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I have seen it four times in theaters as I write this if that's any indicator of the supreme level enjoyment this film gives me. Seriously, if you're in OC you have no excuse not to see this... it's playing at the Campus theater in Irvine and the Regency theater in Laguna Niguel. Herzog and Cage throw a most incendiary molotov cocktail into the stale police-procedural drama genre and it is endlessly gratifying. Herzog subverts the genre conventions by completely obliterating them. What maybe begins like your typical crime show or cop movie increasingly becomes a delightfully evil and hallucinatory story. This maybe the first time I've ever seen a POV shot from tripping iguanas or break dancing souls. Or lucky crack pipes.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is easily one of the best films this year. Cage is quite possibly the most fearless actor with the most on-screen presence working in film today. It's a testament to his work that anyone could make that statement after all the shit movies/roles he's done. But when he's on, like he is here, he's fucking on and I'd like to see anyone else try and touch him. This is a film where the plot gradually becomes irrelevant and instead we sit back and bask in the wonderfully rich and crazy world, characters, and perspective of Louisianna, cops and criminals that Herzog and Cage have provided for us.