Essential Viewing: Sid & Nancy

Sid & Nancy is one of those movies that I can watch on repeat a few times in a single day, despite its disturbing nature. It's one of the best biopics ever made, simply because it strays from the typical biographical story arc and instead focuses on the abusive and destructive relationship between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.



Gary Oldman completely becomes Sid (as he does with every character he plays), and the underrated Chloe Webb does a hell of a job with her performance as Nancy.



I think the film's biggest accomplishment is that it doesn't glorify these two at all. It's very honest in the way it portrays them as junkies, who lived in squalor and didn't exactly contribute much to the world other than the story of their infamous downfall. At the same time, however, director Alex Cox somehow sets the film in a dreamy, forgotten New York, the one that James Murphy sings about in "New York I Love You." It gives the film a somewhat romantic quality, which is at odds with the depressing subjects.



Also worth noting: Courtney Love has a very bit part in the film as Nancy's friend. Apparently she was desperate for the role of Nancy, but lost the role because she wasn't an experienced actress. More importantly, doesn't she look like the albino from The Princess Bride?




Anyway, if you like movies about junkies who occasionally play music and murder their significant others, you should definitely check out Sid & Nancy.

Essential Viewing: All That Jazz

To honor the great Roy Scheider's death, and to get my ass into gear and work on the project that I started last month with my post on The Warriors, I'd like to tell you about one of my favorite movies: All That Jazz.



Yes, the title of the film does come from the song from Chicago, and it also represents the self-referential quality of Bob Fosse's epic anti-musical. The film is about as autobiographical as it comes: Scheider plays Fosse's celluloid doppelganger Joe Gideon, a Broadway choreographer struggling through the last days of his fast-paced life of popping pills and screwing (over) the women around him, which include his ex-wife (inspired by Fosse's ex and frequent muse Gwen Verdon) and his girlfriend (played by Fosse's real life and frequent muse Ann Reinking, who later starred and choreographed "in the style of Bob Fosse" the revival of Chicago). It also features allusions to Fosse's previous film Lenny, the biopic of Lenny Bruce starring Dustin Hoffman.

The film is a post-modern musical, and nearly all of the musical sequences (that do not appear on the actual stage or in a rehearsal room) are reserved for the fantastical finale, wherein Joe discovers and, ultimately, accepts his own demise (with a little help from another Fosse player, Ben Vereen).


Like Fosse's film version of Cabaret, the musical numbers do not necessarily further the plot; they either take place in a realistic setting, or serve as distraction from the realistic aspects of the film. Like 8 1/2, to which it owes its inspiration, it features a non-linear plot, and moments of flashbacks and fantasy, in which the adult Joe Gidieon interacts with himself as a child, or with other people from his past. He also has several interactions with an angel of death, played by Jessica Lange.


The film is quite uneven and unbalanced, but in the best possible way: it represents the maddening lifestyle Fosse lived off-screen and off-stage.

This is no queer musical, mind you. I don't think a butchier one has been made, much less involving a musical sequence in which an orgy erupts on an airplane. If you've seen anything of Fosse's, you know that his choreography is incredibly sexual. In All That Jazz he goes full throttle, going out with a bang - not a whimper.

Essential Viewing: The Warriors

John and I watched The Warriors over the weekend, which is easily one of the best late '70s pseudo-futuristic film about New York gang warfare inspired by Greek mythology ever made, especially when the gang members look like this:






The story is simple: The Warriors, a gang from Coney Island, find themselves stuck in the Bronx with every other gang in the city on their trail after they've been wrongly fingered as the outfit behind the murder of a popular and powerful gang leader. They spend the entire film trying to navigate the streets and the subway system home to Coney, with a few thousand enemies hot on their trail.

This is the kind of movie that's so gratuitously violent and misogynist that it has to be taken with a grain of salt. It also helps that you're rooting for a group of gang members from Coney Island throughout the movie. It serves as an example of a film that - if released today - would have a completely softer and more politically correct tone.