Woody Allen's Manhattan

Paragraph 1: George Gershwin's iconic Rhapsody in Blue plays over pristine black and white images of classic New York tableau ... (nah, too declarative. And "iconic" and "classic" in the same line? Bleah.).

Let's see ... Paragraph 1: If you could only choose one movie opening to say everything there is to say about a city and person who lived in it ... (mmm. Who am I, Bill Moyers?)

Uh. Paragraph 1: Woody Allen, in his day, was New York City's biggest fan and greatest ambassador. In his love letter to Gotham, Manhattan, he can be found making some bold, and pitch-perfect artistic choices, even within the first three minutes. (Oooh, I love this ...). Truly one of the great opening scenes in the history of cinema, we start with the New York Philharmonic playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Need anything more be said about that piece? The voice over, often considered a sign of laziness in a screenwriter, here isn't really a voice over at all. It's just Isaac Davis struggling to come up with a paragraph to open his oft-promised, never-started novel. Black and white, was there ever a more flattering way to depict images seriously? (Wait, where the hell am I even going with this? Maybe I should try Queens).

I just learned that my favorite Woody Allen film, Manhattan, is being released on Blu-Ray. I am looking forward to sharper blacks, crisper whites, clearer jazz, and the same sharp crit of pseudo-intellectual bourgeoisie and urban male neuroses that I was so captivated by when I first watched it amongst other film geeks in college. But most of all, I am looking forward to this in high-definition:

Isaac Davis's darkened apartment, he descending a spiral staircase, and his 17 year old girlfriend, played by a sublime Mariel Hemingway, seated far to the left, thumbing through an oversized book. Both are bathed in the only light sources, reading lamps, in the room. Man I love that image, a portrait of a man wandering through his things, struggling to find his way through mid-life, destination known.

Now more than ever, I feel like I live in that darkened room.

"Go, Mordechai!"

Something immediately struck me about this advertisement when it came on in the middle of my Hawaii Five-O. What may have resonated was that it features one of those fantasy Jetsons' domiciles that I love so much. The mid-century modern furniture wired with automation. In fact the title of this beer commercial is "Apartomatic". The clunky toggle-switched control box commanding the Rube Goldberg contraptions that finish off with the self-pouring beer tap are all exactly what I'd want in my place. As are the concealed fish tanks and cathode ray tube TV monitors. So retro cool. So neato.

But that wasn't really it. I couldn't yet put my finger on what it was that struck a chord with me about the commercial. I searched for it so I could post it here as some sort of Bachelor Pad Redux. Instead, I discovered that the commercial was directed by Wes Anderson, and it all made sense. You know Anderson, the auteur responsible for one of my favorite movies, Rushmore, as well as The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

What really charmed me about the Stella commercial then, was what charmed me about Anderson's best-conceived and best-received film, The Royal Tennenbaums. It is on display here in one of the Great Movie Opening Sequences, Anderson's ability to craft a complete and engrossing universe, top to bottom, soup to nuts, word and song.

Greatest Movie Opening Sequences: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix

It is an article of faith, universally accepted in OnceWereBachelor circles, that Steve McQueen is an icon, perhaps Icon Number One. He is one of few real people whom, as the old saw goes, men want to be and women want to be with. So it may be blasphemy not to select his legendary racing movie Le Mans for veneration in this series. But I have mentioned Mr. McQueen here and here, so I think my opinion of the man is a matter of record.

Le Mans, in fact, is a great movie and perhaps iconic in its own right. The fact that it even exists is testament to the Icon's sheer will. McQueen envisioned it as an artifice-free depiction of the great endurance race, and in watching it one can see that, despite studio involvement, the movie largely delivers that. Very little drama, very much racing - real racing. McQueen's personality, persona, and devotion to the motorsports must have been turned up to eleven, to overcome the Suits who were concerned about the marketability of such a film; one which was really an unadorned depiction of a 24 hour race going round and round, and in which its principal bankable star would do his own driving at race speeds.

So, despite not being blessed with the Greatest Movie Opening Sequence in a Movie About Racing, I present to you, the opening sequence of Le Mans, in which Icon Number One wordlessly tours the early morning roads of France in a 911T of pristine condition and provenance, prior to doing actual battle with hated Ferrari in a Porsche 917 in Gulf livery.

We now move on to the actual subject of this post, Grand Prix, starring James Garner and Eva Marie Saint, and directed by All-Timer, John Frankenheimer. This sequence is the Greatest because it is everything about the event and almost nothing about the man. It captures the details of pre-race preparation, the sliding throttle bodies, the wrenching, the vintage helmets, the roaring engines. And the goggles (we all know how much I love goggles). The lore is that Frankenheimer labored to develop a technique that would portray cars racing in a way never before seen, and I think he's succeeded. It doesn't have the mythology of Le Mans, especially as history passes judgment, but as a technical achievement in its own right, it may be more exciting, more entertaining, more complete a movie. And so, Frankenheimer serves up a better movie of lesser legend, one which begins here in Monaco, and wends its way through Formula 1 Europe circa 1966, stopping at such locales as the Belgian GP circuit, Brands Hatch, and - most dramatically - through the deadly banked turn at Monza.

And this post would not be complete, I think without a goat. And that goat is Sly Stallone and Reny Harlin's Driven, about some palooka named Joe Tanto brought back to the sport to mentor a young buck named Jimmy Bly in IndyCar racing. I would describe this as the racing movie analogue to the stripper flick Showgirls. Actually, the movie does a fair to middling job of referencing the other two movies here, but that's about as good as it gets and arguably its more rip-off than homage. So here, coming in DFL*, is its trailer, wherein much of the car racing is computer generated. Ick.

* In racing parlance, dead f**king last.

Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)

Cameron Crowe is one of the more deserving of media darlings. I'll spare you the backstory, just watch the autobiographical Almost Famous. His movies are always more satisfying than the five movies that I watch before or after. Each one is special, even the smash hit from whence he got the money, Jerry Maguire. His other Tom Cruise movie, Vanilla Sky, offers one of the great opening eight minutes in recent memory. Keep in mind that Crowe intended this movie to be one non-stop pop culture allusion from beginning to end.

This is just a cursory list of things Crowe has crammed into the first eight minutes that make it both great and OnceWereBachelorean:

1. New York City from a God's eye view;
2. Central Park;
3. The Dakota;
4. Bachelor Pad;
5. Penelope Cruise's voice in her native tongue;
6. Audrey Hepburn, from Sabrina (and therefore a hint of Humphrey Bogart);
7. Disappearing plasma screen;
8. Mahogany wainscoting;
9. A Bout de Souffle poster;
10. IWC Schaffhausen Spitfire Mk XV pilot watch on leather with deployant buckle;
11. Smashed Gibson SG under glass (could be Pete Townshend's);
12. Ferrari 250 Granturismo Omologato;
13. Times Square, completely empty (I say again: Times Square, completely empty);
14. The mother of all anxiety attacks, amidst the most amazing billboards west of Tokyo (there's a panoply of relevant images that flash at this point, but I'm not going to try);
15. Repeat;
16. Cameron Diaz under the covers;
17. 1967 Ford Mustang 390GT (trust me, I can tell from the V8 burble);
18. R.E.M.; and
19. Cameron Diaz dancing to R.E.M. in leather pants.

It doesn't stop at minute eight, and the whole movie is worth multiple viewings. Just ignore the critics and the box office. And ignore that Tom Cruise is in it.

Bombardment Society Founder

Somehow, this commercial for General Motors' Hummer captured my imagination years ago, back when gasoline was abundant and affordable. I loved its exuberance, and of course, the Who track tugged at my heart and made me chuckle. I saved an episode of Frasier on VHS somewhere, merely because it contained this advertisment.



So when I first watched auteur Wes Anderson's sophomore film Rushmore for the first time on DVD and after the hype died down, the opening montage pulled me in the same direction. The film has become one of my favorites (along with Anderson's The Royal Tennenbaums). The British Invasion music is there, as is the go cart and the whimsy. It is one of the great movie opening sequences because it succinctly introduces the character of Max Fischer, Rushmore Academy's ne'er do well who dances along the edge of expulsion, finally teetering off in a wild fandango.



I think I could do worse than raise my son into a Max Fischer, even though Max Fischer is a failure of sorts and, in a sentence, "one of the worst students we've got" at Rushmore. Come on, he's not the lacrosse captain, but the equipment manager. He founded the Bombardment Society, thereby lending gravitas to the playground game of sham battle. He is only ever seen dressed in his alma mater's crested blazer and, once expelled and stripped of it, he has to struggle to rediscover his own self-image. But he succeeds in that struggle, thus, in my opinion, erasing all his earlier failures.

Except for a brief episode of self-doubt, Max is ever the optimist. He is the high school playwright and director who figures out how to involve pyrotechnics in his productions. He launches a petition to save latin. He is the Boy Who Would Not Bend. I respect that. In fact, contrast him to a pre-Lost in Translation Bill Murray, a self-made, self-loathing millionaire who first makes Max a protege, then competes with him for the heart of a young school teacher. Neither of them win her, that would've been weird, but who wages the more effective fight? Why, Max, of course.

Yes, I'd like my son to be the lacrosse captain, although knowing his old man, he won't be. But I'd like him to be Something Else, and I know he will be that.

Greatest Movie Opening Sequences: Raising Arizona

They say that, in film, the voice over is a tool of the lazy storyteller. I believe that the opening 12 minutes of the Coen Brothers caper farce Raising Arizona is the exception, and that it may even prove the rule. Watch it and pay close attention to the rhythm of the narration weaving in and out of the bluegrass banjo and whistling, the images and the action, the spoken dialogue delivered at least at 3 different sound levels, even the flashbulbs and sirens. It all combines in a visual and sonic symphony done in half time, just under 100bpm.

And that's not even to mention the words themselves, as delivered by H.I. Listen to some of these tidbits: "at first I did not believe it; that this woman who looked as fert-tile as the Tennessee valley could bear no children. But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place were my seed could find no purchase. ... Biology and the prejudices of others conspired to keep us childless. Our love for each other was stronger than ever. But I preminisced no return of the Salad Days."

It's virtuoso film making really.

It is like the guitar intro to the Jimi Hendrix masterpiece, Little Wing. A little bit of genius introducing more genius.

Okay then.

Trad Movie (Greatest Movie Opening Sequences, Chapter I)

There are a lot of Trad devotees who visit this blog so I thought I’d inaugurate my list of Greatest Movie Opening Sequences with a very traditional movie, one with an overture meant to be played over a closed theater screen curtain, featuring one of the most revered motorcycles ever (the Brough Superior), and introducing to us the great historical figure and example of British eccentricity and perseverance, T.E. Lawrence, portrayed by Peter O'Toole (also introduced here for the first time). There’s even a cameo from Field Marshall Lord Allenby.

In what was probably one of the greatest Dates With Someone Other Than My Wife, I saw Lawrence of Arabia, restored by Steven Spielberg, at the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Ave., in D.C. in 1988. The Uptown remains one of the last urban stand-alone cinemas, resisting the tide of multiplexes that now dot the landscape, and boasts a crimson lobby and a large screen that defies real estate values. The film was an “event” movie, and we went dressed up and had burgers beforehand at a kitschy art deco diner nearby. Besides the overture, the film had an intermission, during which time we retreated to the lobby where we enjoyed cheesecake and coffee, standing at bar-height café tables. The lobby lights flickered and we went back in for the second half of the movie.

So behold the opening sequence to David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. The first five minutes are devoted to music only. Your patience is rewarded, though, by perhaps the finest argument in favor of filming in widescreen (it's filmed in Super Panavision). The sequence concludes with Lawrence's gripping final ride through the Dorset countryside before he meets his demise. The coda comes before the main story with a quick illustration of the various misapprehensions of the man. Then, cut to the desert.