Nobody, and I mean nobody, has demonstrated an ability to manipulate popular culture better than Quentin Tarantino. The pop-culture reference is a staple of modern entertainment. Television shows like The Simpsons take delight in finding ways to work a dozen clever references into each episode, and lesser shows like Family Guy owe their existence to pop culture cutaways. Two of the writers of Scary Movie (2000) have even managed to build an entire franchise of execrable films that consist of nothing but references to other films and stories. Tarantino is no stranger to this technique; his films are full of references and homages, even though they are often too obscure to be recognized by the average viewer. What truly sets Tarantino apart from the hordes of hacks who appropriate images and stories from other sources in order to stimulate an audience’s collective memory is that he has an unparalleled ability to weave these references (quotes, songs, even biblical verses) together in unique ways so that they instantly emerge as new memes in popular culture.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Like practically all Americans with (meager) holdings on the New York Stock Exchange, I watched in dismay as my stocks plummeted on Friday. Oil prices spiked, which caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plunge by almost 400 points, just more than 3% of its total value. The Nasdaq echoed the Dow’s performance, losing 3% of its value as well. The amount of trading was the heaviest the market has seen since March, and the bedlam on both the trading floor and in the offices of the brokerage houses must have been truly remarkable.

In his film Boiler Room (2000), director Ben Younger attempted to capture not only the excitement of the investment brokerage world, but also provide some insight into the characters who inhabit it. I grew up in suburban Connecticut, about as far away from New York City as the fictional firm J.T. Marlin was located. There’s a certain class of suburban white male that romanticizes hip-hop culture but approaches it only in a peripheral sense, and my hometown possessed more than a few such teenagers. I’m not talking about wiggers, who slavishly imitate every outfit, accessory, and mannerism that they perceive as representing black culture and desperately yearn for acceptance from their idols, I’m talking about middle-class white youths who somehow gleaned the notion that inner-city life is infinitely more exiting and rewarding than their own mundane existence, but only experience it through music and movies, and never on a firsthand basis.

The Film: Boiler Room

The Song: “What a Thug About”

The Artist: Beanie Sigel

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Popularity: 8% [?]

In Hollywood movies, surfing is basically dealt with in one of two ways. It can serve as the foundation for the film, as in movies like Blue Crush (2002) and In God’s Hands (1998), where trite and forgettable plots are simply window dressing to advance the bright blue visuals. Alternately, it can be used as a background vehicle, as in Big Wednesday (1978) and Point Break (1991), where the movie isn’t about surfing – it’s about surfers. The sport is used to explain an underlying connection between several of the characters, but it’s not really used to advance the plot in any particular way. I much prefer the latter method (Big Wednesday is a great film, and Point Break is harmless fun), but the best surfing you’ll ever see on film is when there’s no other point to the film than to show the surfing itself.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

There was an episode of television’s Friday Night Lights when a new character plays in his first game and forces a game-changing fumble. The lead-up sequence is unabashedly manipulative, as an unseen announcer criticizes Coach Taylor’s inflexible play calling and repeatedly exhorts the Panthers’ need for a big play. I remember remarking, out loud, “this is so predictable!” And yet, despite my awareness of how shamelessly Peter Berg was jerking the puppet strings of my heart, I couldn’t help but feel a swelling of excitement when Santiago burst through a blocker and leveled the quarterback with a blindside hit, sending the ball tumbling into the hands of a teammate and changing the momentum in the Panthers’ favor.

No movie has ever made me feel both so wonderfully uplifted and so deeply cynical at the same time as Forrest Gump (1994). The film itself is the feel-good story of the twentieth century, taking us on a tour of many of most significant events of the sixties and seventies, each punctuated by a digitally recreated appearance by Forrest and one of his homespun sayings. It’s pretty difficult to resist his good nature and simple charm, and there are plenty of scenes where I find my emotional response is more predictable than the salivating of Pavlov’s dogs. And it doesn’t really bother me. On the other hand, while the soundtrack to the film serves its purpose by providing appropriate period music to accompany the fantastical events of Forrest’s life and the world he inhabits, it is absolutely infuriating. I’ll explain why in a moment.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

My ten-year college reunion is this weekend, and while fraternities didn’t exist at Harvey Mudd College, I did spend two years living in our campus’ closest approximation. North Dorm was a mostly male dormitory (to be fair, HMC was a mostly male college) that featured initiation rituals, fairly intense camaraderie, and relied on freshmen to perform most of the manual labor. We even had our own set of Greek symbols (πoe), which represented an activity that I was later banned from campus for engaging in. The dean has graciously given me permission to return to campus (the fool! Muahahaha!) although I can genuinely pledge that I have no evil intentions. And I say this not because I expect my feelings to change once I set foot on campus, but because it’s important for me to make a written record of this now, while I’m sober.

Animal House (1978) is by far the most influential college movie of all time. The concept of filling a dilapidated house with a motley collection of misfits and rejects has been enthusiastically imitated in such films as Revenge of the Nerds (1984), PCU (1994), and Old School (2003). The idea of a “toga party” has become part of our national lexicon. I’m quite certain that at some point Martin Amis, aghast at some of the incomprehensible garbage spewing from the pen of Christopher Hitchens, took aside his fellow writer and told him “my advice to you is to start drinking heavily.” And one can only wonder how many times Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray have trudged home after an unsuccessful night at the clubs and called up Pat Buchannan to complain, “the Negroes took our dates.”

The Film: Animal House

The Song: “Louie Louie”

The Artist: The Kingsmen (more…)

Popularity: 11% [?]

Teen angst is one of the most tempting lodes for an ore-seeking filmmaker to mine. It’s something of a shared experience; the instinct to rebel against authority in any form is a universal characteristic of adolescence. It’s something that most members of any audience can identify with, and sympathize with. But what makes working with teen angst so tricky is that the source of a teenager’s anxiety and frustration tends to change drastically with each generation, and relying on traditional subjects needs to be done perfectly or it becomes just another cliché in an oversaturated genre. Teen angst in literature has given us Holden Caufield and Gene Forrester. Teen angst in film has given us Jim Stark, John Bender, and Jimmy Cooper.

In Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Jim Stark’s issues are caused by his frustration with the dynamic between his ineffectual father and his domineering mother; a reflection of the paternalistic Father-Knows-Best culture of the fifties and sixties. In The Breakfast Club (1985), John Bender has an equally fitful reaction to the behavior of his own father, an abusive alcoholic. Quadrophenia (1979) is a timeless story because more than anything, its protagonist’s problems are driven by a search for identity.

Of Quadrophenia, Pete Townshend himself said, “The music is the best music that I’ve ever written, I think and it’s the best album that I will ever write.” I think Townshend is absolutely right. It’s got a more coherent story and more relevant subject material than Tommy (1969), and the complexity of the music in the album, while often a handicap when dealing with large audiences, is what takes it into masterpiece territory. Quadrophenia is one of the best albums ever produced, and the film version is one of the most memorable portrayals of teen angst that’s ever been captured.

The Film: Quadrophenia

The Song: “I’ve Had Enough”

The Artist: The Who (more…)

Popularity: 11% [?]

The last time I took ecstasy was at a trance party near the beach just north of Durban, shortly after I’d finished reading Matt Ruff’s brilliant fantasy novel “Fool on the Hill.” It was a surreal experience. I took three pills and not long thereafter I found myself on a mattress making out with a pair of very dry lips whose owner I had not even seen. To my good fortune, they turned out to belong to a rather attractive South African girl. All things considered, I’m just lucky it turned out to be a girl. I’ve heard it said that you should never marry someone you met while on ecstasy, at least not in the first six months, and I’m quite sure that it’s true.

I doubt I’ll ever take ecstasy again, but it has nothing to do with Annette (we dated for a few weeks, but the initial spark went out pretty quickly). Something about the way my brain was inputting information was very unsettling that evening. Every so often, my vision would scatter and jump, and it was almost like I could visualize neurological connections in my brain short-circuiting and disappearing in a puff of metallic-smelling smoke. In the scene in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) where Romeo first infiltrates the Capulet mansion and meets Juliet, Baz Luhrmann creates one of the more inspired visualizations of what an ecstasy trip is actually like.

The Film: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

The Songs: “Young Hearts Run Free” and “Kissing You”

The Artists: Kym Mazelle and Des’ree

Who’s Who: I don’t think I really need to discuss the stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as the star-crossed lovers, except to mention the role of Juliet was originally meant to go to Natalie Portman. And the film features an impressive ensemble of familiar stars, including Paul Sorvino, Brian Dennehy, Pete Postlewaithe, and John Leguizamo, as well as providing an early look at future heartthrobs Jesse Bradford and Paul Rudd. The movie even includes a surprisingly watchable Jamie Kennedy as a pink-haired lesser Montague. (more…)

Popularity: 13% [?]

In my post about The Rules of Attraction a few weeks back, commenter Idp presented the idea that many of the heroes in action movies fall into a subclass of the alpha male as “reluctant alphas.” I think there’s something to this. A number of classic action movies (Commando, Rambo, Lethal Weapon) introduce their hero as someone who lives in relative isolation and is either persuaded or forced to act in an extraordinary situation. At the same time, these characters continue to resist occupying positions of actual leadership, and the corresponding responsibilities that accompany such positions. The case of Captain Benjamin Willard, played by Martin Sheen, provides an interesting example of this “reluctant alpha” in both fictional material and in the actor’s real life.

The Film: Apocalypse Now

The Song: “The End” (download)

The Artist: The Doors

Who’s Who:

In this opening scene of Apocalypse Now (1979), we’re introduced to our reluctant hero, Captain Benjamin L. Willard, played by Martin Sheen. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Martin Sheen as Captain Willard, although Harvey Keitel had originally been cast to play the part and was actually dropped two weeks after shooting had already begun. Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack during production, which was one among many other disasters that came close to shutting the film down entirely. (more…)

Popularity: 14% [?]

There’s a certain art to crafting a great movie trailer that is sort of a scale model of the art of crafting the advertised movie itself. Often a trailer contains dialogue that’s been edited together differently than what you eventually hear in the movie, scenes and jokes that are dropped by the final cut, and songs by Coldplay or Fatboy Slim that are completely absent from the film or its soundtrack album. The recent rash of recut, homemade trailers for imaginary films like “Shining” and “Must Love Jaws” have taught us that a clever and dedicated editor can completely redefine a movie simply by selecting fragments of it and piecing them together in a unique way.

Awards for the best trailers are handed out in June at the annual Golden Trailer Awards. Statuettes shaped like a gilded camper trailer are awarded to previews in just about every conceivable category — Best Documentary, Best Foreign Romance, even Best Video Game Trailer.

Personally, I think the greatest triumph in the art of making trailers is “the ugly duckling” — taking a terrible movie, distilling the finest two minutes of footage, choosing the perfect music, writing some good lines for voice-over god Don LaFontaine to intone with thunderous import, and stitching them all together to create an overwhelming rush of images and emotions that convince the viewer, all contradictory knowledge notwithstanding, that a movie like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) is going to be great.

Some trailers have the opposite effect. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to see There’s Something About Mary (1998), which turned out to be hilarious. The trailer for Go (1999) is another disaster, yet the movie is actually pretty good. I’d heard enough about the disastrous screening of Southland Tales at the Cannes film festival in 2006 to know that the film was going to be an overwrought mess. But when I watched its trailer I was pretty enticed by the use of the ponderous “UK Surf” version of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” in the first half. And given my limited knowledge of the movie’s plot, Elbow’s “Forget Myself” seemed like it would be used somewhere in the film’s final moments, or possibly over the end credits. To my dismay, it isn’t used in the film. At all.

The Film: Southland Tales

The Song: “All These Things That I’ve Done”

The Artist: The Killers

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Popularity: 20% [?]

Sometimes, when you’re choosing the soundtrack for an adapted screenplay, the source material hands your songs right to you (such as in the novels High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis). And even though it’s about 2700 years old, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey most likely did include its own soundtrack as a critical part of its performances in its original iterations. The Odyssey begins with the line “O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story…” and consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, which probably lent itself very well to a musical form. In the Coen Brothers’ loose adaptation O Brother Where Art Thou, however, the original rhyme and meter of the text (which of course, was in Greek) and the music, if it was actually preserved, have been discarded to accommodate the vernacular and musical traditions of Depression-era Mississippi.

The Film: O Brother Where Art Thou

The Song: “I’ll Fly Away” (download)

The Artist: Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss (more…)

Popularity: 15% [?]