A Quick Movie Diary: On SHAMPOO, LA HAINE, and THE FIRST SLAM DUNK (Patreon)

I see a lot of movies I don’t end up writing about.

It’s mostly just a natural result of how I go about writing. Because I don’t do normal reviews. Nor do I like getting into adjective-heavy prose where I describe a film’s qualities. Instead, I like latching onto something that feels like a big meal and I can start digging into the functionality or the deeper themes behind it. But often it’s a really time consuming approach that doesn’t leave room for a lot of little stuff. Like, when I wrote the mini-book about The Bear I genuinely had to block out a massive chunk of time and be like “this is literally all I can do and think about for a couple weeks,” because seeing a new movie will genuinely distract my thoughts away from the task at hand. Moreover, sometimes I’ll plan on doing a big deep dive with a movie coming out, but it turns out what I think about it ends up being a few short and sweet observations. And this week that happened a few times this week as I happened to do one of my favorite things, which was go to the movies three days in a row. Two showings were at The Eagle theater at the newly-opened Vidiots (which is wonderful). First, a screening of Hal Ashby’s classic SHAMPOO. The second, the first time I ever saw LA HAINE (I know). And lastly, I had a little mini ani-me feature adventure because I ventured over to CityWalk to THE FIRST SLAM DUNK. And thus I thought this would be a nice little chance to do what I never do and write some more short-form thoughts on each experience.

Gettin Sudsy With SHAMPOO (1975)

Hal Ashby is one of the best to ever do it. He was actually an incredibly successful editor before he became a filmmaker, working on classics like In The Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, and The Cincinnati Kid. And he’s actually one of the figures genuinely credited with turning editing into a more deeply-respected art form. The kind where you endlessly tinker and find the perfect points and was one of the first to like sleeping in the office as he worked (we can lament this choice from a work-life balance perspective, but can’t down the passion). But that uncanny sense of timing is something you feel in his films. They somehow feel loose, organic, and natural, yet they’re razor sharp and pointed at the exact same time. As a storyteller, he had this knack for bringing this outsider, hippy sensibility to stories that ranged from outlandish existential comedies (Harold and Maude, Being There), to sensitive stories about soldiers inner lives (The Last Detail, Coming Home) and even made a Woody Guthrie biopic (Bound For Glory). But it was always 1975’s Shampoo that was my favorite.

Ostensibly it’s a film “about” Jon Peters. That would be the famous Hollywood Hairdresser turned Babs Husband turned Movie Producer who was also an infamously absurd person. Yes, he was the subject of Kevin Smith’s “fight a giant spider” story and his real life persona was more recently played by Bradley Cooper in Licorice Pizza (and yes, by all accounts, he really was like that). But the truth is that Shampoo is more using the idea of him (that would be hetero sex slinging Hairdresser) as a vehicle for Warren Beatty to explore his infamous womanizing and all-around general horniness (I’m using the word infamous a lot, but it just is the right word every time). Tell the story of an idiot who just can’t help but fuck every single he meets. But good god is this film a murderers' row of the hottest people who ever lived: Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Carrie Fisher, Lee Grant, and sure why not, Jack Warden can get it too (I was also struck by the Bisexual elements in this one, particular the scene where Beatty doesn’t answer when questioned on it, which ties into many real life things about him). But its success is about so much more than all that.

Starting with the fact that Beatty’s so damn funny in it. I could watch him pinging around with his slack-jacked, vacant stare all day long. But watching with an audience for the first time, you realize how much the film is powered by this constant nervous laughter that stifles out as you watch these dumb delusional dinosaurs attempt to navigate their lives. But there’s a reason Nixon’s election plays ad nauseam, along with why most of them are (literally) in bed with conservative elites. It’s a movie concerned with all the ways we flitter about and thus fetter our progress again and again. But as much as critical of a system and the set of hypocritical “values” of many of the characters, it’s all done with that trademark Ashby sensitivity. The film has a weird kind of love for everyone on screen. Everyone has an intimacy to them. A humor. A guilelessness. A simple, if often misguided want. The film is many things: funny, irreverent, and full of like SO many hot people, but above all, it is distinctly human.

On Amour-ing LA HAINE (1995)

There are so many movies we haven’t seen. I mean, I have seen *checks notes* “a metric fuck ton” of them. To the point that when I often come across some random “best of x” list, I’ve usually seen all of them. Most of which was just part of earlier education and a kind of obsessive instinct to see it all. But that’s slowed down a lot. And moreover, there is ALWAYS going to be some random film from the past I never got to. The funny thing about this reality for all of us is that it always tends to bring on incredulous responses from fellow film fans when they’re “you haven’t seen X?!?!?!?!” which is a sentiment I tend not to like. Because it has this vague implication that the person who has not seen X has somehow failed. Again, I could go tit for tat with a million things the other has likely not seen in equal measure, but that’s a dumb game. The whole point is that the response of “oh my god, I’m so excited you get to see this” is sitting right there. I know it’s a little verbiage thing, but it’s one that matters and makes the right, more welcoming, non-judgmental feeling around movies themselves (much like how in Thai they don’t say “I don’t like this” they say “I don’t know how to eat this,” which is brilliant).

Anyway, I hadn’t seen La Haine!

Which is surely the newest entry in “quietest I have ever heard an audience during credits” cause jeezy petes. But it’s a film that is absolutely full of life. Positively brimming with it. It’s all loud, booming, chaotic candor. And I have to admit, I sort of have a tough time WHILE I’m watching a film that is 90% shouting, just in a pure physical sense where it starts giving me a headache. But I also understand what the film is doing completely and why it's being employed (some other films just mistake yelling for intensity and drama). And more importantly, the next day I can just sort of reflect on it and it is all still sitting there. The power is so evident. But it’s also the rare movie that can create something that can go for sudden, shocking, gutting, and random - and yet, because that very notion is set up so succinctly from the get go, it works as a complete, heartbreaking thought. And leaves you hollow all the same.

Mini-Ani-Me: Getting High With THE FIRST SLAM DUNK (2023)

Movies are funny things. They are this weird sum of endless odd, organic choices that somehow “add up” into cathartic emotional experiences. I always talk about this in terms of “function,” which usually employs every lesson I’ve ever learned in an effort of diagnosis, which has basically been my whole thing for years now. Sometimes the faults of a movie are obvious. But sometimes it’s not obvious at all. Sometimes they can have all the right parts. Sometimes they can “work” and actually be pretty darn good anyway! But still there can be just these funny little choices where you can look at it and you can be like “this has an odd little problem and it could take this movie from good to incredible.” And the little nagging problem with the FIRST SLAM DUNK is I never wanted to re-edit a movie more (in the sense of just moving existing whole scenes around) since I saw Blue Valentine.

The whole thing is completely, bafflingly off point. It could CONSTANTLY be on the verge of making things pay-off, especially because it knows the story it wants to tell (and it's a good one) but it is always goofing on the set-ups and order of information and always going for some retroactive explanation. Again, we still kinda get there. But when you see the way its fumbling this it’s kind of maddening. I was constantly like “why wasn’t this scene two scenes ago or why wasn’t X pushed later” because if it ordered it right that big moments where x happens in the game would be TWICE as transcendent. For example of how this normally works, look no further than the ongoing masterpiece that is Haikyu, which has this incredible ability to nestle the stories within stories and make you care so damn much about each and every little thing that happens on the court, all en route to the big moments being cathartic WHEN THEY ACTUALLY HAPPEN. But that’s just because it uses classic structure and understands the timing of information to make you feel those things. But The First Slam Dunk sometimes feels like it just takes that structural understanding and jiggles the order and timing box willy nilly. It’s always just a little bit off. And again, if you weren’t looking, you probably wouldn’t notice it, but I genuinely felt insane. But the thing is that the movie itself, especially the ELECTRIC execution of the final sequences, can still charm you past those structural faults. And I would absolutely die for the red hair boy (even though his story flashback comes STUPIDLY late). But in the end, movies are funny things. Like people…

Sometimes the flaws are what make them distinct.

<3HULK