FilmJerk Favorites

A group of unique directors and the essential works that you've got to see.

||| Norman Jewison |||
Norman Jewison

Yes, he directed “Moonstruck” and two unforgettable musicals, but Jewison is also responsible for a trilogy of films focusing on racial-injustice, a whacky Cold War comedy and a signature film of Steve McQueen’s showing that he is one of the most versatile directors since Robert Wise.

This blueprint for good investigation dramas tells the story of a black Philadelphia detective investigating a murder in Mississippi who matches wits with a redneck sheriff. Groundbreaking for it’s time, this Oscar winning film is still relevant today and offers a gripping mystery with terrific dramatic performances by a complete cast of fully realized characters.

This is an amazingly funny and entertaining irreverent "Cold War" comedy about a Russian submarine stranded outside an isolated New England town, which throws the locals into a panic. Jewison does a delightful job of utilizing his all-star cast to their fullest, deftly mixing Capra-esq characters with Mel Brooks’s type situations (and vise-versa).

A bored millionaire (Steve McQueen in his prime) masterminds a flawless bank job as Faye Dunaway (an insurance investigator out to get him) identifies him as the mastermind and falls in love along the way. This is the original and the best, with all the arch stylized movie techniques of the ‘60s (including split-screen and fuzzy shallow focus) and the most erotic chess game ever captured on screen.

Recommended by CarrieSpecht

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Lords of Dogtown

By EdwardHavens

June 3rd, 2005

It should come as little surprise that the new skateboarding drama from director Catherine Hardwicke, a former production designer on such films as “Three Kings” and “Vanilla Sky,” is visually plentiful and fallow on plot. Working with roughly seventeen times the budget of her directorial debut “Thirteen,” Hardwicke, screenwriter Stacy Peralta and their team have exquisitely captured a moment in recent history, but those looking for any kind of in-depth analysis of the birth of the skateboarding revolution are best off renting Peralta’s 2001 documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys.”


Peralta, working off his own life story and those of his closest friends, has not written a rounded story as much as presented a series of moments chronologically strung together, which only skim the surfaces of who he and his buddies were, what drove them, drove them apart and eventually brought them back together. If the Devil is in the details, and it is those little tidbits of truth which make a story interesting, what we get here is little more than Uncle Stacy’s slide show of what he and his buddies Jay Adams and Tony Alva once did a long time ago. They rode, they ruled and they were forgotten for a while. That’s about it. There are some peripheral characters, including Tony’s sister Kathy (Hardwicke’s “Thirteen” collaborator Nikki Reed), who is lusted after by both Stacy (John Robinson, of “Elephant” non-fame) and Jay (Emile Hirsch) and causes the first in a series of rifts between friends, and a hotshot promoter (Johnny Knoxville) who steals Tony (Victor Rasuk) from Team Zephyr, but most of the time is spent with the three amigos, who, conveniently, all had some kind of hand in the production of this film.

So why should you care about this movie? I’ll give you two reasons, which will probably, on the surface, not mean much to many people. First and foremost is the incredible cinematography by Elliot Davis, whose done some impressive work with the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Alan Rudolph, but nothing on the level seen here. The fluidity of the camera work during the many skateboard point of view shots put us right in the action, as the riders bomb hilly streets, carve around empty swimming pools and around a full pipe. If you’ve ever seen a behind-the-scenes documentary about filmmaking, you know the movie cameras used on Hollywood productions are not small and not lightweight, which makes what Davis was able to do that much more remarkable.

The other reason to see “Dogtown,” and I seriously never thought I’d be saying this anytime soon, is the masterful transformation of Heath Ledger from matinee idol to an actor worth paying attention to. So what if it only seems like Heath’s doing his interpretation of what he thinks Val Kilmer might have done with the role of Skip Engblom, the creator of Team Zephyr and unofficial father figure to the boys, ten or fifteen years ago. It’s Ledger’s most assured performance to date, and his moments are the best in the movie. However, good skating footage and one exception performance would probably not be enough for most people to make this film anything more than a curio for those who were a part of the late 1970s skateboarding phenomenon. Being a little skate punk pre-teen in Long Beach, wishing I could be a tenth as good as the Zephyrs, I found the film to be a fascinating window to my own past, despite the film’s obvious flaws. I doubt others will be as forgiving.

My rating: B-