15 Directors Who Shaped My Movie Love

So there's this meme going around that Paolo tagged me with. So why not? The idea is that you list 15 directors, mainly off of the top of your head, that contributed to the way you experience and think about the movies. This is not a list of my all time favorites though half of the list would probably overlap. This is the list I come up with when I think briefly on the formative masterminds and/or the ones that have or had some sort of claim on my soul if you will. Three of them I could definitely live without at this point but I'm trying to be honest about the exercize.

Wise with Wood ~ West Side Story 

So here goes in no particular order... 


ROBERT WISE (1914-2005)
When I was a kid West Side Story and The Sound of Music were the most Epically ! Epic !!! movies to me. At the time I didn't quite grasp the auteur theory but at some point I became aware that this guy had made both so therefore "He must be the best director of all time!" Later I discovered that he wasn't but I still think he's a stronger talent than he gets credit for being nowadays.
first encounters: The Sound of Music and West Side Story (on television) 

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980)
As I said in my Rope retro, he's training wheels for any young budding film buff who is curious about The Man Behind the Curtain (Hitch or otherwise).
first encounter: North By Northwest (I think I saw it here, the place I saw many old movies for the first time. My parents didn't know what a monster they were creating by taking me there regularly.)

WOODY ALLEN (1935-)
For the same reason as Hitchcock really; it's impossible to think you're watching anyone else's film. Woody was the first director I "followed", eagerly anticipating and attending each movie as soon as I could. As a result, he'll always have a place in my heart.
first encounters: Broadway Danny Rose (in theaters... my older brother's idea), The Purple Rose of Cairo (in theaters, my idea)

Wyler meeting Charlton Heston's son.

WILLIAM WYLER (1902-1981)
The auteur theory isn't everything. This man understood dramatic storytelling and didn't dumb it down but made accessible all the nuances and fine points. Plus he could wring top notch work from all kinds of actors. His resume is deservedly overstuffed-with-classics. Just last month while watching The Best Years of Our Lives I even dreamed of watching all of his movies chronologically in a row for a blog project. I bet it would be an awesome journey. 
first encounters: Ben Hur (revival house) and Wuthering Heights (VHS) 

STEVEN SPIELBERG (1946-)
Because everyone loves him and therefore he was ubiquitous when I was growing up and still is to a degree. There was no question that he was shaping Hollywood and more than one moviegoing generation. I never felt personally attached but he was always present in the movie menu.
first encounters: Raiders of the Lost Arc & E.T. (in theaters)... the latter is the only movie I can ever remember seeing with my Grandma *sniffle*






JAMES CAMERON (1954-)
Because I seriously wish he was mandatory study/viewing for anyone assigned to direct a mainstream action film. He's never created an action sequence that was boring or difficult to follow (few others can say the same) and even if the dialogue is and was a bit clunky, his films are such masterful pop(corn). Plus, like all the greatest directors, he doesn't ignore female characters but makes them crucial players.


first encounters: The Terminator (cable), Aliens (in theaters... one of the very first R rated movies I ever saw in theaters. Ooohh.)

Pedro and His Muses celebrate All About My Mother's Oscar win

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR (1949-)
Truth: I look forward to no one else's movies more. Pedro always gives audiences something for the heart, the brain, the eyes and the groin and rare is the filmmaker who understands to provide us with all four pleasures in each and every film. 


first encounters: Women on the Verge... (in theaters), Law of Desire (VHS) 

Ridley with Veronica Cartwright on 
the Nostromo in Alien (1979)

RIDLEY SCOTT (1937-)
Because he made two movies that I remain deeply in the thrall of (Blade Runner and Thelma & Louise) and kicked off one franchise I obsessed over regularly for a good long while (Alien). And he helped inform my love of Art Direction within movies. All that but I could never work up much enthusiasm for anything in between or after those three peaks which just goes to show you: even if you love someone's something, you never know how it's all gonna shake out in terms of fandom.

first encounters: Legend (in theaters), Blade Runner (I can't remember how I first saw this...? There's too many versions!)

TIM BURTON (1958-)
He started off so very strong and stylized. Few things are as pleasureable as the weird and whimsical as long as they're genuinely felt and not manufactured. Unfortunately...  no, no, let's not go there! I can't deal.

first encounters: Pee Wees Big Adventure (I think on cable?), Beetlejuice (in theaters)

Sirk with Dorothy Malone on the set of Written on the Wind (1956) 
Why is she reading My Antonia?

DOUGLAS SIRK (1900-1987)
Because he influenced so many directors I love but I came to him after his ancestors which is like a glorious reminder that there's always more to experience from the past. When you sift through cinematic history you might even love someone so much that you wish you could jump in a time machine and shake the person's hand or give them a million kisses or a bear hug or promise them your first born child, depending on how they react to you arriving in the time machine in the first place. Maybe you should just send a thank you note in the machine.



first encounters: Lured and All That Heaven Allows (on DVD)

DAVID LYNCH (1946-)
Because he's a true original and yet his highly personal films resonate with so many people. It's like he was practicing Inception long before Nolan ever thought it up; his dreams and nightmares became ours. Plus, he made me believe in television as a powerful artistic medium in its own right and for its own reasons and not just the cinema's poor uglier relation. 


first encounters: Dune (in theaters) and Twin Peaks (television)

Campion's Bright Stars

JANE CAMPION (1954-)
Because there were so few female directors when she rose up but it was no kind of affirmative action enthusiasm -- she could have been a genderless space alien and would have still completely vaulted to the top of Directors Whose Movies You Must Watch!


first encounters: The Piano (in theaters), Peel (on VHS)

INGMAR BERGMAN (1918-2007)
It's not only that he made deeply great movies. I am fascinated that he ever existed at all... or rather, he has come to represent a myth / reality that I did not experience firsthand but am always fascinated to think on: the 1960s and 1970s and how adventurous movie fans once were. (See also: Federico Fellini.)


first encounters: Cries and Whispers and Persona (VHS)

ROBERT ALTMAN (1925-2006)
Movies should be crowded with true character... and characters. And they should be alive with possibilities as if the camera could follow anyone offstage and there would be a whole new movie waiting, tantalizingly out of reach.


first encounters: Fool For Love (VHS), The Player (in theaters) 

Bale & Haynes hit a Goldmine!

TODD HAYNES (1961-)
Because he keeps growing and therefore keeps us guessing. And because his one of his pet themes, the fluidity of identity, is among the most cinematic of themes.

first encounters: [Safe] (VHS), Velvet Goldmine (in theaters) 

If you ask me who are the "best" or my "favorite" directors the list would have to change at least by a third, maybe even a half. But that would require more careful consideration. If you ask me who from the past I'd like to resurrect to make one last motion picture the list would look crazy different. But that might be a fun list to make some time. Hmmmm.

I don't know who to tag since this meme has been going around for some time now. So I say YOU in the comment section: which 15 directors shaped your ideas about the movies in your formative film years.

Get Away Fom Ripley You Bitches

JA from MNPP here. If you consider Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien a horror film (and you really should consider Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien a horror film) (and even more specifically it should be considered it a slasher film, just a slasher set in outer space) then it becomes immediately clear that Ellen Ripley, the character immortalized by Sigourney Weaver in this and its subsequent three sequels, started out as a fairly straightforward Final Girl. She fits in right beside Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter's Halloween and Heather Langencamp in A Nightmare in Elm Street - the smart girl who sees the encroaching horror and manages to outwit outplay and outlast the danger.


Ripley's not really the Action Hero we think of until Jim Cameron's sequel - make that Action heroine, THE Action Heroine; she made and broke and burned the mold up with a flamethrower. And even there Cameron does all sorts of interesting things with the idea of an Action Heroine that so many films today don't bother to even contemplate - Ripley, even when she's kicking ass, is a character that is always painted with as much femininity as possible, on top of her butchness.

When I say "femininity" I don't mean objectifying her as a sexualized, desirable woman (although those moments where Sigourney strips down to those tiny underpants are important, I'd argue, in that they stick that obvious physical facet of her womanhood front and center). Adding in the character of the uber-tough Vasquez in Aliens is a clear attempt to slide Ripley's character to the center of the femme-to-butch scale - she seems so demure and ladylike standing next to Jenette Goldstein in her red bandanna! - but great pains are made over and over again to code Ripley as a mother figure. Her protection of Newt and the introduction of the Alien Queen with her pulsing egg sac as the big villain - it's all a way of designating a space for a specifically feminine sort of rage within a heretofore male dominated film space.




Ripley's character only gets more and more complicated as the sequels progress and I think, even with the hit-and-miss nature of the last two films, it's clear that's what kept Sigourney coming back over and over again. Ripley becomes a broken martyr and then she becomes an infected experiment, half-human and half-something else - and as sloppy as Resurrection is I dare you not to get chills in the scene where she confronts the deformed other versions of herself. That scene's actually an interesting statement upon the fractured nature of Ripley at that point - the way the movies split her apart and built her up again in a different director's vision time after time after time.

Anyway that's a little history of who Ellen Ripley is, and what she became. We came for the monsters but we stayed for the lady. And now Ridley Scott wants to take us back there, only more back, as he's working on a prequel to his 1979 film. Names have been popping up like aliens out of rib-cages over the past few weeks. Everybody from Natalie Portman to Gemma Arterton to Noomi Rapace and now Anne Hathaway have been rumored for the lead role of "a female Colonial Marine general" in the time thirty-five years before the events of Alien.

I know a couple versions of the scripts have been around because some people seem to know more about the character then that, but I plan on keeping myself as spoiler-free as possible... and yet I still feel the need to contemplate! Shocking, that. I've been going back and forth over it in my head and I can quite decide what's the smartest route to go - should they even try to have this character be anything like Ripley? Or should they go in a completely different direction and have them be nothing like each other? Will it feel like an Alien movie without some vestige, even shadowed, of her there? Or does that shadow just swallow up all the light? I mean is it even possible to make a character that won't be seen through the prism of Ellen Ripley anyway?


It's really an impossible question and hopefully the team making the movie are just working on crafting a good story with not only an interesting character for the female lead but interesting roles for the entire cast, and not obsessing over this one facet like I seem to be. Yet I don't have a movie to make, and all the time in the world until the movie's sitting in front of me, so obsess I shall. What do y'all think?

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poll by twiigs.com

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A Link of Their Own

Have your eyes yet feasted on this actual handwritten letter (thx Boy Culture) that Madonna wrote to photographer Steven Meisel? So much pop cultural memory jogging is happening: Herb Ritts, the "Sex" book in idea form, The House of Extravaganza, and --eep! -- everyone's favorite female baseball picture A League of Their Own ("Geena Davis is a barbie doll"... "I hate actresses..." HA!).

That's better than any time machine in taking me right back to 1992. This is why no one should ever throw anything handwritten away ever.

The Big Picture $40 million is the new ceiling for Hollywood drama budgets. It's about time they figured that out. You can make a great one for that amount so why not improve your profitability potential?
All Things Fangirl on Batman 3 speculation (it's actually Batman 8 if you ask me, though I know everyone likes to pretend the first 5 Bruce Wayne pics didn't happen) Which female villain should appear. I say none because of Nolan's girl problem. I was just innocently reading along and then my fur went up and I started hissing. You'll know why.

i09 interviews Eliza Dushku about the departed Dollhouse now that it's all on DVD. Will she work with Joss Whedon again?
Star East Asia Reign of Assassins character posters. I am so ready to see Michelle Yeoh again. Bring this movie to me.
Empire Black Swan graphic design
/Film Green Hornet poster
I Need My Fix Adam Sandler in drag? My eyes!
Topless Robot They're converting the whole Harry Potter series into 3D. I would someday like 2 pennies to rub together myself but sometimes the insatiable miserable greed in this world is really unsettling.

<--- Meanwhile, in my weekly column for Towleroad I've issued a cinema-altering challenge to James Cameron involving Elizabeth Taylor, bitched about the MPAA and their fear of peen, and shared a performance moment from the dueling trans stars of Portugal's Oscar submission. Why is it that no matter where you go in the world, the drag playlists remain exactly the same?