And the history of American movies, specifically, has been full of them, from the down-and-dirty gangsters of the 30s (in real life and the movies) to Clint Eastwood’s mysterious outlier, The Man with No Name, whose silence had the strange effect of tearing Western myths apart.Īnd yet neither of those archetypes comes anywhere near to explaining the Bret Easton Ellis invention Bateman, who, as chaotically brought to life by Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s darkly satirical American Psycho, isn’t just an antihero-because he’s a rich yuppie who terrorizes and brutally murders women and the homeless. Antiheroes are most certainly not a 21st-or even 20th-century innovation. There’s just something about Patrick Bateman. It’s the ultimate American movie, a feature with underground cultural credibility that is also an icon of independent moviemaking and bro-cinephile obsession. The Big Lebowski is about a world, a political landscape, in which conflicting American values clash against each other, all of it embedded in style, references, and stoner dreaminess. Lebowski is a simmeringly smart-but also wild-tale, anchored by a loose, meandering central turn by Jeff Bridges as the Dude, who finds himself caught up in a world of mistaken identity, nihilist thugs, bowling, extortion, and outrageous violence. The Big Lebowski is one such movie, and its famous “Gutterballs” fantasy sequence, with its dancing bowler girls, flying Jeff Bridges, and Viking Julianne Moore, is one such scene. And yet even by those standards, it’s funny to see a modern, American cult-film nod, not to Howard Hawks or old gangster movies or the like, but to the dizzying, kaleidoscopic dance numbers of Busby Berkeley, known for filling the screen with circles and rows of showgirls, dancing out geometric fantasies to the audience’s delight. They’ve been showing off just how much the history of Hollywood fills their DNA directors, their public image says, are movie-lovers above all else. Since at least the New Hollywood era, our favorite American auteurs have been filling their movies with references to other classic Hollywood movies. And on ‘action,’ it was supposed to be the most joyous experience in the world.” - As told to Laura Bradley We’re sitting there cold and hungry, and miserable, and having to pee. And at some point we both had to pee terribly and there’s no like, ‘Yeah, can we get the lift back in so that we can go to the restroom?’ There was none of that.
It was one of the most hysterical experiences. We were up there for hours because you would have to bring the lift back in, take it up, and then have us go down. We were trapped on this little tower with our set coats so that we wouldn’t freeze. Leo and I would go on a construction lift and it would drop us off at the top, and then the lift would go away so that it wasn’t seen during filming. For the ‘King of the World’ scene, there was a separate piece of set-a tall tower-piece that just had the front of the ship. “When we shot this scene, it was cold and windy and awful down in Rosarito Beach. Everything here-the Randy Newman needle drop, the adolescent delight-was a choice that would come to define a generation (and then some) of children and parents worldwide. It’s fascinating to watch this opening scene now, knowing what Pixar would become.
So began the transformation of mainstream American animation, which, on the shoulders of Pixar, shifted dramatically toward computers and the rich, clever storytelling that has become as synonymous with Pixar as photocopies are to Xerox. All of this-what would come to be identified as the Pixar trademark-springs to life, fully formed, in the opening moments of the company’s 1995 debut film, Toy Story, as a boy named Andy plays cowboys with his delightfully mismatched toys: a cowpoke named Woody, Mr. It’s all been there from the very beginning: the consummate genre cleverness, the animation with its affectedly rounded edges and warm tones, and the emotional appeals to not only kids but their nostalgic parents, who wish they were kids.