This is a meme that I thunk up.

I'm tagging Sherman with it, but anyone else who wants to play is welcome. If you have a blog, post it there, let me know in the comments and I'll post a link. Or you can just put it in the comments.

The idea is this: Name three movies that you have shown (or would show) to a new girlfriend/boyfriend to let them know what kind of person you are.

Mine are all films that I actually did show to new girlfriends-who also happened to be my two longest relationships, but who knows if there's a connection or not.

The first was Creator, directed by Ivan Passer from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven, who very freely adapted his own novel. This is the story of a scientist who acts as mentor to a young protege in both the ways of science and the ways of love. Oh yes, and he's also attempting to clone his long-dead wife, which accounts for the sad edge to what is both a comedy and a romance, if not necessarily what I think of as a romantic comedy.

The scientist is played by Peter O'Toole, who is brilliant. The love interest of his student (Vincent Spano) is played by Virginia Madsen. And yes, this was the start of the crush I have had on her ever since. It was also the last film for a handful of years in which she would play, for lack of a better phrase, a "nice" girl.

She was broadly typecast as a sexpot in most of her films between this and Sideways. Given how hot I think she is, I'm not exactly complaining about that...yet in Creator, she has an astonishing quality which frankly, I kind of missed since.

.

(Also in this movie, David Ogden Stiers pulls off the neat trick of playing an aggresively hostile surgeon who in no way resembles his Major Charles Emerson Winchester III on M*A*S*H)

I remember having to stop the tape in the middle when showing it to my new girlfriend, because we had to go somewhere, and asking her what she thought of it so far. She said she thought it was very sad, because it's about a man who cannot get on with his life.

I was happy when I was able to finish showing it to her, because his overcoming that is kind of what the film is about.

The next film is All That Jazz, directed by Bob Fosse and co-written by him with Robert Alan Aurthur. I actually wrote an article about it for a fanzine a few years ago, but unfortunately (or not), it's not online.

This is, for better and for worse, the best depiction I have ever seen of the artistic personality, or at least mine. I showed it, to be frank, at least partly as a warning.



It's kind of dark, so as an antidote I showed the same girl...

The Fisher King, directed by Terry Gilliam from a script by Richard LaGravenese. This is also kind of dark along the way but there is, as they say, a light at the end of the tunnel. It's all too easy for me to imagine I would react in the way Robin Williams' character does in this film if I suffered the loss he does.

Gilliam's commentary on the laser disc version is also one of my favorites. He talks about the proper use of movie stars and points out the power of withholding their "trump cards." For example, I knew that a scene near the end of the movie, where Jeff Bridges turns around with a big, silly grin on his face, was exhilarating.


What I didn't know was that Gilliam had very specifically prevented Bridges, who has a great smile, from doing it in all the previous scenes to increase its power.

I think Mercedes Ruehl's Anne (now where have I heard that name before?) and Amanda Plummer's Lydia are two of the best women characters in films of the last 20 years.

I take pride in writing my women characters well, and films like this are very much my model-I've referred to LaGravenese's essay in the script book often.

(Come to think of it, an early version of my Annabel, Keitha and Colley story contained a reference to this movie)

Another thing I like about the film and script is that it finds time for character moments which in more streamlined films would be cut. They don't exactly advance the plot, but they do give the film much of its meaning for me.

I'm thinking especially of Michael Jeter's great monologue as the homeless man after Bridges asks him if he lost his mind gradually, or just all of a sudden. The one which begins "Well...I'm a singer by trade..."

My experience is that a lot of "film buffs" paradoxically seem to wish Gilliam was still with Monty Python or would just stick to making "serious" science fiction. They seem to me to underrate this movie which sad to say, may be the last Gilliam film which I truly, richly enjoyed.

I've liked things in all his films since but this is the last one that sent me out of the theater singing. Almost literally: "I like New York in June, how about you?"