Not really a review of this movie but RIP Jonathan Demme all the same. 

There is a wonderful moment in Something Wild, Jonathan Demme’s freewheeling screwball road movie and just about my favourite movie of all time, in which our newly cut-loose yuppie hero, Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels), in covert hot pursuit of the girl he loves (Melanie Griffith) and the ex-con tough (Ray Liotta) who stole her from him, installs himself in the parking lot of an all-black church in Virginia with a snack and a pair of binoculars, training a tired eye on his marks as they lounge about the pool at a motel across the road. Exhausted, Charlie takes a nap — only to be stirred from…

Yes, the soundtrack is great.

The scene where Charlie shows up at the diner and confronts Ray, though, made me so fucking angry. He shows up, and instead of saying, "hey Lulu, let's go, ditch this guy," he speaks to Ray. He says he's taking her back; he spars with Ray over Lulu as if Lulu isn't even there, as if she is literally an object he has to acquire. It's tiresome. Lulu tries hard to redeem the film a few minutes later, throwing Charlie out of the car by the railroad tracks, but of course it doesn't end there. It lets him off the hook. That act of independence is swallowed.

And there's a fight scene with the death…

My dad has been trying to get me to see this for MONTHS! He would ask me all the time if I’d seen Something Wild yet. I finally caved. I can’t remember seeing him smile so hard as when I asked him if he wanted to watch it tonight, he may have shed a tear.

Not at all what I was expecting! The poster makes it look like a screwball comedy, which is where act I feels like it’s going, but as time goes by, the movie gets dark, and real. You really get to know Lulu and her insecurities.

Jeff Daniels absolutely blew me away. I’ve always enjoyed him in Dumb and Dumber and his various Aaron Sorkin projects,…

"Doubling Up"

For seven decades of romantic screwball comedies, sexy, smart, funny women have been waking up heroes who, through fear or shyness or a stuffy educational background, were denying their deepest impulses. The women perform a rescue mission. Sometimes, in earlier eras, they did it in the guise of dumb blondes (like Marie Wilson) or dizzy dames (like Katharine Hepburn in BRINGING UP BABY), but mostly they were wisecracking broads, like Mae West and Joan Blondell, and Jean Harlow in RED DUST and CHINA SEAS, or they were kooks, like Shirley MacLaine, and Barbra Streisand in THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. The theme of the repressed man being “brought out”—liberated—by the sexy woman is the male fantasy-equivalent of the…

This was the most exhilarating moment of the Eighties. 

There are only a handful of films in our lives which actually change us. Movies with a distinct line between before and after. Pictures which awaken something; make us feel as if we're different people the next day.

I'm not just talking about your favourite movies though...

I'm talking about that first cut where you needed stitches; I'm talking about the first time you saw a dead body; I'm talking about the first time a girl stuck her tongue in your mouth; I'm talking about the first time you listened to The Velvet Underground & Nico; I'm talking about your grade four field trip to the Ontario Science Centre, where you got…

This film’s tonal shift from screwball sex comedy to dramatic thriller isn’t my favorite, since the humor in the first half of the film is inspired whereas the drama of the final hour feels sort of aimless, but ultimately this film is doing something beautifully honest with the subject of romance: Behind every hot woman, no matter how manic-pixie the dream girl may be, is a deeply complicated world full of ups and downs that you are intruding on when you step into her life. And if you were to realistically venture out into the world seeking to live out a wacky sex comedy with someone like that, you’re probably gonna end up in a Jonathan Demme drama. So when…