Is that what it is?

by Kevin Powers

Highly-anticipated this year has been HBO’s latest drama series “The Leftovers,” based on the novel by Tom Perotta and developed for television by Perotta and Damon Lindelof (show runner of ABC’s “Lost”).

Three reasons for my excitement:

1) “Lost” is my favorite TV show ever. Those who know me know I have an unhealthy obsession with it and all its lore and mythology.

Matthew Fox as Jack Shepherd in ABC's "Lost"

2) Tom Perotta wrote the novels “Election” and “Little Children," both of which were made into two of my favorite movie experiences. 

Matthew Broderick as Jim McAllister in Alexander Payne's "Election" (1999)

 

Patrick Wilson and sexy Kate Winslet in Todd Field's "Little Children" (2006)

3) The premise is just plain interesting. This will be a show, like “Lost,” that offers more questions than answers. I like that.

Members of the "Guilty Remnant" stage a protest in HBO's "The Leftovers"

The pilot episode opens with a woman on the phone with her crying baby in the laundry mat. She goes to her car, puts the crying baby in the car seat, the crying stops, she turns around, the baby is gone.

Two percent of the world’s population, we learn next, has just vanished.

Three years later, small town police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) must navigate this changed world along with his troubled high school student daughter, Jill (Margaret Qualley).

His estranged son, Tom (Chris Zylka), lives on a compound across the country with a mysterious fraud artist named Wayne (Paterson Joseph).

His wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), left him and is now a member of a group called “The Guilty Remnant.” They don’t speak, wear white, chain-smoke, and lurk around town silently protesting and recruiting more people.

One of their new recruits is Meg (Liv Tyler).

Their goal is yet unknown.

The second episode develops a couple of other characters, but doesn’t begin to answer any questions.

I've read some pretty bad reviews of this show over the past couple weeks, claiming the show is just too dark and brooding for its own good. Not sure I agree with that.

Another critic, Brian Tallerico, in his review on RogerEbert.com, suggests that the show doesn't really know where it wants to go and claims that the visuals are flat, containing no striking visuals or symbolic imagery. I can't see that. I've found many perplexing images, especially in the Pilot (directed by Peter Berg).

Here's one:

The characters in this world of loss have only a few choices: some self-destruct, some go extreme religious, some go cult, some try to forget and can’t.

Some lost all, some a few, some none. The world lost only a small fraction.

But why? That is the question.

Like its characters, the audience gets a taste of the confusion and anger and sadness and sense of belonging. People are gone with no explanation.

At one point, Garvey tells someone “Sorry for your loss.”

She responds with angry sarcasm: “Is that what it is?”

Well, wouldn’t we all like to know? Just what is it?

I plan to find out. 

That Southern Poet Returns

In my most recent column for The Courier News here in Clinton, I have submitted a brief discussion of filmmaker David Gordon Green's career and pitched his latest two movies, returns to his former glory.

Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Danny McBride in Pineapple Express.

You'll find the short version in the paper. This is the long version:

I'm willing to bet that if I polled the metro area, most people would have seen, or at least heard of, one or more of the following works of comedy:

Pineapple Express (2008)
Your Highness (2011)
The Sitter (2011)
HBO’s comedy series Eastbound and Down

Alas, if I polled the same audience, I would wager that only a mere fraction would have even heard of these meditative indie dramas: 

George Washington (2000)
All the Real Girls (2003)
Undertow (2004)
Snow Angels (2007)

Such is the wonder that is the career of David Gordon Green. The man all these works have in common.

Candace Evanofski and Donald Holden in George Washington.

I can't say exactly how I came upon the work of David Gordon Green. At some point around 2005 or so, living in Murfreesboro, a broke, college film buff, I began digging into unknown (to me) areas of the cinema.

I began seeking out the films of lesser-known-in-the-mainstream directors, like, for example, Terrence Malick. See Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012). All great, powerful, challenging films.

I'm thinking at some point during my Malick excursions I ran across George Washington, which plays a bit like it came from the School of Malick. In fact, as lore has it, Green watched Malick's The Thin Red Line repeatedly before he began shooting. George Washington, along with Malick's Days of Heaven, changed things for me a bit. Now, movies were no longer these little bottled up, packaged blasts of entertainment or laughter. Now, movies could simply exist as images of natural beauty with little plot or dialogue. Oh, that they could do that! and still carry the emotions that we movie-lovers crave.

David Gordon Green's first two features are like poems, odes to young love. In George Washington, the lives of a group of poor, mostly black kids in rural North Carolina are forever changed by a simple accidental tragedy. It captures their first real friendships in the hot Southern summer and it does this without any sensationalism or special effects.

In fact, the only special effect anywhere near this movie, or Green's sophomore effort All the Real Girls, is a genius named Tim Orr. As Green's go-to director of photographer throughout his career, Orr has likewise established himself as a true master of the movies.

Zooey Deschanel and Paul Schneider in All the Real Girls. 

All the Real Girls continues Green's duo of young love's odes. It is the just heartbreaking story of a small town player played by Paul Schneider (another of Green's friends from the North Carolina School of the Arts), who falls for his best friend's younger sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel). I mean this movie hits you like some sort of quiet freight train. It is astounding to find an artist who is so in tune with what it means to be young and in love.

Devon Alan and Jamie Bell in Undertow. 

Undertow and Snow Angels, the third and fourth in Green's filmography, explored a more violent view of the world. Undertow stars Jamie Bell as a teenager caught up in a long-standing sibling rivalry between his father (Dermot Mulroney) and uncle (Josh Lucas). Snow Angels tells the story of a small town couple (Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell), recently divorced, and what happens when their young daughter goes missing. Mixed in is the budding relationship between two teenagers (Michael Angarano and Oliva Thirlby). Both are beautiful tragedies steeped with Green and Orr's ability to capture natural beauty and human pain and sadness and love.

Sam Rockwell in Snow Angels. 

So that's it. In seven years, David Gordon Green made four of the best movies of decade.

During that time, he somehow became acquainted with a trio of comedy men...Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Judd Apatow.

Now, it is known that David Gordon Green went to school with genius comic actor Danny McBride. In fact, McBride got his start in Green's All the Real Girls and a morbidly black comedy by fellow schoolmate Jody Hill called The Foot Fist Way. (Jody Hill and Danny McBride would go on to make the HBO series Eastbound and Down. Green directed quite a few episodes over its four seasons. I believe the connection to McBride is what brought Green into mainstream comedy.

Anyway, in 2008, in his review of Pineapple Express, Roger Ebert wrote of Green as “that poet of the cinema.” To film buffs like Ebert and me, it was confounding that Green would make this movie. It is an expertly made comedy. His stoner comedies to follow:  not as good.

Where have you gone David Gordon Green? 

           

Which brings us to 2013....

....where David Gordon Green comes full circle with two small, near perfect little movies.

For me, it has been like coming home.

Two films, each strikingly different from the other, set in small town, Texas. One, a strange buddy comedy called Prince Avalanche. And the other, a dark, brooding study of abuse and violence called Joe.

Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch alone together in Prince Avalanche. 

Prince Avalanche, available for Instant Watch on Netflix, stars Paul Rudd (his best work) and Emile Hirsch as a pair of road workers painting lines in a remote Texas woodland devastated by wildfires. It is quiet and true and oddly funny.

It starts out with just two guys, walking in the woods at sunrise. They don't speak to each other. They just start working. What comes is an odyssey of sorts. There's an old man who brings by some good hooch every once in awhile. An old woman lamenting about the loss of her home in the wildfire. There are the weekends when Emile Hirsch's Lance goes back to the city to strike out with the ladies. Paul Rudd, with no one to play off, shows a side of himself we've never seen. In one scene, he enters the ruins of a house, walks in, and just plays house. It's just so odd and fun.

At one point, Alvin (Rudd) says to Lance, "There's a difference between loneliness and being alone." Yes. That's it. David Gordon Green returns to his roots with a different and challenging comedy about being alone with yourself and finding it good.

Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan in Joe. 

Joe, available at the Redbox, features a performance from Nicolas Cage that is his best in years. He plays the title character, a rough ex-con who befriends an abused, hardworking 15-year-old named Gary (Tye Sheridan, Mud). It is one of the most powerful movies of the year.

This movie is violent. There are beatings and shootings and near rapes and whorehouses and dogfights. What's so astounding about it is how it is, at the same time, so tender and full of real emotion. As Joe, Nicolas Cage simply becomes him. A compassionate man who runs a crew of mostly poor, black workers killing trees to make way for new evergreens. He is known as a tough man, but a man you want to work for.

Green takes his time (unlike so many these days) and truly lets the characters grow on you. My first paragraph about this movies makes it seem like some standard story about an ex-con teaching a boy life lessons. Well, I won't say that doesn't happen, but it happens when you don't expect it and not at all how you would think.

The true revelation of this movie is an "actor" named Gary Poulter, who plays Wade, Gary's evil incarnate, abusive, alcoholic father. Not many actors could pull this off. Knowing this, Green cast this guy. If you were to IMDB him, you would find nothing. He's not an actor but a homeless man Green found on the street on the outskirts of his hometown of Austin, Texas.

That's just another reason to be astounded by and to seek out David Gordon Green's work. It feels good to have him back to his Southern gothic roots. Real good.

The man, the myth, the legend...Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) in HBO's Eastbound and Down.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

by Kevin Powers

A stage actor, two unknowns, and Vincent Piazza as The Four Seasons in Clint Eastwood's  Jersey Boys. 

“Jersey Boys,” based on the Broadway musical, stars a talented lead in John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli (Tony Winner for the original play). He does a mean impersonation.

There are some surprisingly funny references, especially in the introduction of Joey (Joseph Russo), actually Joe Pesci of “Goodfellas” fame, who in real life played a role in getting The Four Seasons their big break.

Vincent Piazza, perfectly cast as criminal/guitar player Tommy DeVito, kicks off the story, which uses a broken fourth wall having the other three members of the foursome tell Frankie’s story directly to the audience. An interesting idea that I’m sure works even better on the stage.

That’s about it for this entire movie. It is, in fact, sometimes just bad. Most of the first act seems to be a sort of “Goodfellas” story, slowly playing up the rags-to-riches theme. It is nice and polished. Why, then, should there be a scene where characters are in a convertible that’s obviously been shot on a sound stage?

Clint Eastwood, a fine director, can’t quite seem to figure out where he stands on the production. Is this a gangster movie or a musical? And why waste Christopher Walken?

Franki Valli and the Four Seasons are known for some of the best pop songs of the early ‘60s. It’s exciting to hear them, but why are they so muted and underdone.

Which brings us to the ugly…

The makeup work in the later scenes is atrocious, most notably in the fake facial hair of Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen). It jumps around in time uncontrollably. Frankie Valli’s “family drama” comes out of nowhere and doesn’t land at all.

Biopics are often very good. This one is barely okay. When the musical number at the closing credits played, I was finally seeing the movie I had hoped for.

“Jersey Boys” is a missed opportunity.  

Produced and Directed by Clint Eastwood

Screenplay by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, based on their play “Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons”

Starring John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Vincent Piazza, and Christopher Walken

Rated R for language throughout

Now Playing at: Cinemark Tinseltown USA (Oak Ridge), Regal West Towne Mall, Regal Pinnacle 18 (Turkey Creek), Regal Riviera Stadium 8 (Downtown Knoxville), and Carmike 10 (Millertown Pike)

Not Widely but Deeply

by Kevin Powers 

Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort are a perfect match in "The Fault in Our Stars."

In “The Fault in Our Stars,” Shailene Woodley delivers a perfect performance as the protagonist, Hazel Grace Lancaster. But the antagonist is cancer, and Hazel is dying.

She has a form of lung cancer and carries an oxygen tank in a little roller backpack. She is 17. Witty, intelligent, a reader. The cancer has made her wise beyond her years.

Woodley plays this to perfection. She has this gaze and half-smile that exudes worldliness as if she’s seen it all before. It’s the same sort of power she brought to her performance in last year’s “The Spectacular Now,” my favorite movie of 2013.

Augustus (Ansel Elgort) is 18, in remission from his cancer but at the cost of one of his legs, yet totally unshaken. He is charming, good-looking, smart, and when he sees Hazel at support group for the first time, it is love at first sight, despite the oxygen tube across her face. Hazel is instantly attracted but reserved about getting into a relationship with the knowledge that, well, she’s dying and all.

As their love story plays out, they will grow closer, find themselves on a Make-A-Wish trip to Amsterdam, gaze at the stars and even drink them from a glass.

But when it all comes down, I expected to be shaken a bit more. At one point, Hazel and Gus talk about being remembered. Is it better to be loved widely by all or deeply by few? That’s how I feel about this movie. In the end, I wanted it to hit me harder with the deep emotions it so expertly builds in the beginning. Instead, it softly widens at the end and loses its punch.

Don’t let my one little criticism deter you. “The Fault in Our Stars” is perfect for its teenage audience and will likewise touch adults of all ages. It is beautifully written and directed and powered by the chemistry between two talented young actors. 

Directed by Josh Boone

Screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber

Based on the novel by John Green

Starring Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Nat Wolff, Laura Dern, and Sam Trammell

Note: This is a review for The Courier News, Clinton, TN. 

Underprivileged

by Kevin Powers

Brie Larson and John Gallagher, Jr. chase down a troubled youngster in Short Term 12.

Early on in this film, a new counselor at a juvenile inpatient treatment center introduces himself and makes the mistake of saying that he "always wanted to work with underprivileged kids." A quiet, sad-looking kid named Marcus blows up. "What do you mean by that!!?" Marcus knows he is "underprivileged," yet he also knows he must defend himself from that label. That is the power of this film. It raises the ultimate questions one finds when dealing with teens from bad home lives. Those being:  Can I make it out? Will I have a good life? Am I doomed to be miserable?

Written and Directed by Daniel Destin Cretton

Starring Brie Larson, Frantz Turner, John Gallagher, Jr., and Kaitlyn Dever

Destin Daniel Cretton's Short Term 12 is a rewarding movie experience. It follows a week in the life of a twenty-something teen counselor named Grace (Brie Larson), who finds herself dealing with her own abusive, troubled past when a new girl named Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever) arrives at the facility. Grace is good at her job, even loves it. She shares a small house with her co-worker boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.), a loving, supportive man. She finds out she's pregnant and that her abusive father, who went to prison on her testimony, will be released in the coming weeks. It's a brutal week on top of the fact that she works and deals in the most basic, harsh human pain. 

I realize I'm making this movie sound like a dark, depressing slog-fest. Not the case. Cretton's direction is assured. Simple, realistic, he and his director of photography, Brett Pawlak, use handheld cameras, everything is close, in your face, real. It has all the trappings of an "indie film," yet it's elevated by the simple power of the story being told. Destin Cretton, once a youth counselor himself, obviously lived this life. In that, Short Term 12 is a labor of love.

Brie Larson is a phenomenal actress. She has done some great supporting work in recent years. In the Showtime dramedy United States of Tara, she played the quick-witted, rebellious daughter of a woman with multiple-personality disorder. She has also delivered a some solid work in feature films like last year's The Spectacular Now and Don Jon. She plays characters with a quiet, confident calm. This, her first starring role, is no different. Only this time, tasked with carrying a movie, she proves that a long, quality career awaits her. I honestly don't see, in a year with pretty weak performances in the Leading Actress category, how Oscar missed her. Her performance here is certainly worth a nod. 

The rest of the cast shines as well. John Gallagher, Jr. of HBO's The Newsroom shows a different side of himself . Whereas his Jim in The Newsroom is a sharp and quick, clean-cut news producer, here his scruffy, shaggy-haired Mason is calm and understanding. As the girl put in the charge of Grace and Mason and the team at "Short Term 12," Kaitlyn Dever is daring and real. In her, Grace sees herself and must face the demons that have haunted her for so long, that now haunt young Jayden. 

How hard it must be to have lived through abuse and neglect and abandonment. We see the ensuing rage of "the kids" at "Short Term 12." The tantrums, the outbursts, the bad attitudes, the self-harm. Cretton's screenplay and confident direction make us feel that feeling. The feeling of being alone and unsure and scared. Luckily, there are people like Grace and Mason, people in our real world existence that live to create safe environments and comforts for those forced to deal with such pain, people who sit down and listen to what these kids have to say, admires their rap lyrics or drawings or stories. 

As a middle school teacher, I've seen my fair share of troubled youths. You can easily spot them. They're the ones who argue, who defy any authority, who seem sad and beaten down, who build barriers of protection around themselves. If you're lucky, you get through to them. You become one small, yet significant, piece of brightness, hope in an otherwise hard life. This is what people like Grace and Mason, counselors and teachers and therapists, try to do. So, maybe you have to chase down a screaming kid running across the lawn once in a while, let a kid cry on your shoulder, cuss it out of their system. Helping a troubled kid takes guts and stamina and empathy and understanding. Some have those qualities, some don't. Grace does.

Short Term 12 is an underprivileged movie. Made on a low-budget, digging into subject matter that is difficult and challenging, movies like this hardly see the light of day. This is a film that is perfect for teenagers, yet I guarantee you if I polled my local high school, none of them would have heard about it. I often find that the smaller, more intimate movies are often better. I know of several young people who could benefit greatly from a viewing Short Term 12. I can only hope that they will rise above and seek out the movies that cruise underneath the hype. 

Time in a Bottle

by Kevin Powers

Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto and Evan Peters as 
Quicksilver in "X-Men: Days of Future Past."

The most striking thing about “X-Men: Days of Future Past” is that it has somehow figured out how to seamlessly put all the pieces together taking elements from the original trilogy, the “Wolverine” origin movies, and 2011’s reboot, “X-Men: First Class.” All of the characters we’ve come to really love through this series are here.

In the near future, man and mutant have been destroyed by an army of robots called “Sentinels,” created originally to protect humans by replicating the abilities of the mutants. The world is a dark, deathly place in the future. Under the guidance of perennial frenemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) uses her transformative powers to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to 1973. There he is to convince the younger versions of Professor X and Magneto, a drunk, downtrodden Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and a Pentagon-incarcerated Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), to stop the shape-shifting Raven a.k.a. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing the man responsible for designing the life destroying “Sentinels.”

Along the way, a new X-Man (if you will) is introduced and thus begins the funniest, most entertaining half-hour of movie I’ve experienced all year. The character is Quicksilver (Evan Peters), a teenaged, kleptomaniac with supersonic speed, so much so that he can slow down time. His performance alone is worth the price of admission, and I missed him when his screen time was up.

“X-Men: Days of Future Past” is of the best superhero movies ever made (see “Spider-man 2,” “The Dark Knight,” the original “X-Men”). It is an absolute blast that I would recommend to anyone even if you haven’t seen the others. And as a time-travel movie, it only makes your head spin in a good way. 

Directed by Bryan Singer

Screenplay by Simon Kinberg; Story by Jane Goldman & Simon Kinberg & Matthew Vaughn

Starring Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence







Note: This is a review written for The Courier News, Clinton, TN. 

Beautiful, Savages

What follows is an attempt at a simple movie review capped at about 300 words, which is hard for me as I am in love with my own words. I am in talks to start writing a weekly feature column on movies for my local newspaper, so I am practicing.

Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Oliver Stone's Savages.

by Kevin Powers

Oliver Stone is a hit-and-miss director. His last movie was the 2008 George W. Bush biopic W. It was pretty good, but only in its controversy. Stone is most famous for his realistic Vietnam epic Platoon, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1986. His latest outing, 2012’s Savages, is a different kind of movie for Mr. Stone. And that much I appreciate.

Savages is a violent, sexually-charged crime drama about a duo of California pot-growers, who happen to have “the best cannabis in the world.” This is what our narrator O (Blake Lively) tells us early on. The pot-dealing duo is the hotheaded former Marine Chon (Taylor Kitsch, TV’s Friday Night Lights) and the free-spirited, Zen master Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Godzilla). They love their business and each other and their woman, the lovely blond O.

When a Mexican drug cartel, led by the evil Elena (Salma Hayek) and enforced by the equally evil and crazy Lado (Benicio Del Toro), wants in on the product and are denied, all turns to bloody action-violence. That is pretty much all there is in the way of plot: an open love-triangle of young, beautiful beach people run-in with some bad, bad people and the stuff hits the fan.

Oliver Stone is a technically sound filmmaker. His camera is constantly moving creating a frantic, fast pace. Savages is alive and vibrant in its bright ocean blues and white sands as well as its blood-red soaked Mexican deserts. This is a dark movie in a bright, sunny world. The violence is sometimes over-the-top and certainly not for everybody, but if you’re looking for a fun ride through the crime-riddled, present-day West, then I fully recommend it for a late Saturday night piece of entertainment.

Reviewer’s Note: Oliver Stone’s Savages is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. It deserves every bit of its R-rating and is certainly an adults-only title.

Missed Masterpieces: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Kevin Powers

As a middle school English teacher, I always find it difficult to enjoy the same books as the kids I teach. I like realism. They like fantasy. I worship Irving and Steinbeck. They worship Collins and Riordan. Young adult literature, especially for young men, is usually more on the fantasy, zombie, action, sci-fi spectrum. I never liked that sort of thing even when I was their age.

Every once in a while, there is a game-changing YA title. None more so than Stephen Chbosky's 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It tells the story, in personal letters, of a freshmen named Charlie and his coming-of-age through mix-tapes, new friendships (with a couple of artsy seniors and a great English teacher), love, sex, drugs, death, and mental illness. It is a powerful, beautiful story. Its film adaptation is next in my series of essays on movies I wanted to see in theaters but missed for one reason or another.

Directed by Stephen Chbosky

Screenplay by Stephen Chbosky, based on his novel

Starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, Paul Rudd, Dylan McDermott, and Kate Walsh









The most striking thing about Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (apart from the fact that he wrote and directed his own novel himself) is how the characters are just the best people ever. I actually wrote that in my notes during my second viewing. They are. They are flawed. They are hurt. They are emotional. They are real. In fact, this is the most realistic depiction of high school life I have ever seen. Other "teen movies" should see this one and feel ashamed.

The casting of actors couldn't be more perfect, especially having read the book. Logan Lerman plays the perennial wallflower Charlie. He is starting high school. He is nervous. People think he's weird as he had a sort of break down the previous year after his best friend committed suicide. His father (Dylan McDermott) is a nice, yet serious man. His mother (Kate Walsh) is supportive, yet oblivious to many of his problems. His sister (Nina Dobrev), a senior, isn't really willing to include him. His middle school friends avoid him. When he happens upon Patrick (Ezra Miller), a senior in his freshmen shop class, he sees a potential friend. He's right. At the first Friday night football game, he cautiously approaches Patrick and, where most "teen movies" would have him struggle or initiated in some sort of hazing, is welcomed with open arms. Then Patrick's step-sister Sam (the beautiful Emma Watson) joins them, and Charlie is welcomed even more...and infatuated. His first real crush.

Over the course of this film, Charlie will experience in one way or another many of those "challenging" young adult novel issues. He finds himself embroiled in his own depression and loneliness, which is somehow connected to his relationship with and the death of his Aunt Helen (Melanie Lynskey), who was a victim of sexual abuse and domestic violence, a theme which is continued in the abusive relationship between his older sister, Candace, and her boyfriend Ponytail Derek (Nicholas Braun) and with Sam, who experienced abuse as a young girl and became promiscuous as a young teen. There is also Patrick's homosexuality and experimentation with drugs and alcohol. All of this is tastefully done, even at its most shocking, under the backdrop of early 1990s suburban Pittsburgh.

There is a scene in this movie that literally made my heart pound. And it doesn't contain any violence or action or a psycho killer behind a door. No, it is a first kiss. Stephen Chbosky directs this scene to perfection. This is a man who knows how powerful a first kiss, a first love can be, and I applaud him as a writer/director for crafting such power.

The soundtrack is perfectly on point with tunes ranging from Dexy's Midnight Runners' "Come On Eileen" to The Smiths' "Asleep". In fact, one of this movies charms is the aging idea of the mix-tape. These are people who spend hours making mix-tapes for each other. How personal and satisfying to both parties. A lost art. But I digress...

For me, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a masterpiece because it is a labor of love. Novelists never get to take their own material and become screenwriters AND directors. That Chbosky was given this opportunity makes it that much better. A troubled young man's seemingly damned freshmen year becomes the best year of his life. He goes to dances and parties and live performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, exchanges Christmas presents, has a first date, a first love, a first girlfriend, a first kiss, reads great literature provided by a caring, charming, and just plain sweet English teacher (Paul Rudd) and ends up getting a taste of what life has to offer and what they future may hold. That last half hour of this movie contains revelations that will shock anyone, and then it comes back around with doses of love straight to your heart. At the end of this movie, I felt haunted...and healed. 

I Heart the 80s!

by Kevin Powers

The most memorable movie scene of my life contains three classic songs from the 1980s, each one unique and from a different genre. The scene I'm talking about is from Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 ode to the porn industry circa '77 - '85 Boogie Nights. At a certain point, Anderson shifts from his starting point as a glitzy Robert Altman into a crazy Marty Scorsese. Not to say that Anderson was overly derivative. He was just trying stuff out and whippin' that camera around.

In the scene, a high-end drug kingpin named Rahad Jackson played to sweaty perfection by Alfred Molina invites the star Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) and his entourage, co-star Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly) and exotic dancer Todd Parker (Thomas Jane), to his home for a bit of a drug deal...a fake kilo of cocaine for cash. This is an homage to the famous incident in which John Holmes aided in the robbery of a drug dealer, and Anderson throws it all in there: slow-motion, whip-pans, zoom-ins, perfect sound mixing and editing as there is a Chinese kid in the background lighting Black Cats one after the other and tossing them in the air while the following mix-tape plays in the background:

1. "Sister Christian" by Night Ranger
2. "Jesse's Girl" by Rick Springfield
3. "99 Luftballoons" by Nena

I'll let you see for yourself:

I heart the 80s!

Last night, I watched the pilot episode of AMC's new drama series Halt and Catch Fire. It features a really great cast, including the incredibly charming Lee Pace (ABC's Pushing Daisies) and a look and feel that screams realistic early 80s. Pace plays Joe McMillan, a former IBM salesman, who makes his way to a fictional Dallas company with the grand scheme of reinventing the personal computer. He recruits a down-and-out computer engineer (Scoot McNairy) and a software prodigy (Mackenzie Davis) to help him.

Halt and Catch Fire offers a sort of cool for me. I love period pieces, and I especially love origin stories. In this case, the nerdery of the beginnings of the personal computer boom is sure to be plenty enough to hold my interest, and, after viewing the pilot episode, it has. I love it when movies and TV shows live up to their trailers and thank the marketing people at AMC for bringing The Eurythmic's "Sweet Dreams" back into my life. I invite you to see for yourself and watch the series premiere this Sunday night at 10 PM on AMC.

Here's the trailer:

I heart the 80s!

Which brings me to this morning, when my best friend emailed me from work and asked for some upbeat 80s tunes to request on the office jambox, I obliged him. Here is the playlist I offered:

I heart the 80s!

The Place Where Dreams Come True

by Kevin Powers

"It's the game my father taught me how to play." - Billy Crystal (in an interview for Ken Burns' Baseball)

Baseball is the game every boy's father taught him how to play. Even if your father is, say, more of a football fan, you know the game. We all know the game. We know it because, more than any other game, baseball is inside us. To be very clear: I haven't played catch with my Dad in I don't know how long, yet every time I toss a ball to someone else and that person tosses it back, I feel nurtured. Baseball, after all, is a nurturing sport. In the mid-1800s, before baseball became Baseball, Walt Whitman, in all his grand poetic glory, described it as a way to overcome the trials of adulthood and encouraged all to "fill their lungs with oxygen" in a field with a glove and a ball. Baseball is one of our forefathers, the ultimate father figure. Phil Alden Robinson's Capra-esque 1989 film Field of Dreams is the best baseball movie ever made. Why? It is because it has nothing to do with winning or losing or underdogs or pennant races. No. It's about how baseball defines us as Americans, as fathers and sons.

The audience knows instantly, from the opening shot of that Iowa cornfield at dusk, that this is no ordinary "baseball movie." No. This movie has something to say, something to say about faith and redemption. That first shot says it all. Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) works in his cornfield, wind slightly swaying the stalks, a voice from above whispers, "If you build it, he will come." The camera glides just above the field on a crane establishing a tone that will lead to a dark, heavy mood, almost one of dread. It's all a bit creepy. Then, this movie lightens up. Its magic seeping through nearly every perfect frame as a man masters the ultimate test of faith and comes to eventually understand the true nature of our country's greatest game.

The voice leads him to plow under his corn and build a baseball field. The first phase of his test. This, of course, brings a visitor to his field..."Shoeless" Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta), the long-dead ballplayer, one of the greatest ever, who had his dream of playing baseball cut short by a scandal many believe he had little to do with. The voice arrives again. "Ease his pain," it says. "Who's pain? What pain?" Ray pleads. Maybe it's Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones), a J.D. Salinger-type writer from the '60s, who is haunted by his former success and a hidden passion for baseball. "Go the distance," the voice says. Go where? To a small town in Minnesota where a man by the name of "Moonlight" Graham (Burt Lancaster) lives. He played one inning of one game for the New York Giants 50 years before and never played again. Can Ray help him? Is Ray's little baseball diamond in Iowa supposed to bring him back? Is this field "Heaven?" Ray's belief, his faith that something is supposed to come of this journey is what makes this movie great. That he is supported by his wife, Annie (Amy Madigan), only strengthens this, even in light of the fact that, well, he cut into his crop and could lose everything.

Field of Dreams is a beautiful movie. One the perfect movies of my movie life. It is such, not only in its breathtaking zoom-ins and pastoral color palette of greens and golds or even the masterful speech delivered to perfection by James Earl Jones as Terrence Mann, but also at its core. A man follows an illogical path bent on taking everything away, and, in return, the man gains everything and more. He gets that chance to feel like a good husband to his wife, a father to his daughter, a friend to the heartbroken 1919 White Sox and to his favorite writer as a young man, and, most importantly, a son to his father. That's what baseball does. It makes us all, man or woman, boy or girl, fathers and sons.