Really his first and last movies were all he needed to establish his reputation.

Also Nicholas Ray

‘I imagine Scorsese jumping to his feet in a crowded theater like Zero Mostel in The Producers, “That’s my Jesus!” ‘

Im still confused no one watched this or Streets of Fire and made him the obvious pick for The Joker. Jacks great and all, but come one.

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Her work with Boal particularly has increased the bloat factor.

John Huston?

I don’t know when Howard Hawks defined a good movie as “three good scenes and no bad ones,” but I wonder if it was in reaction to movies like that.

I wonder if Bigelow would make a distinction between addiction and obsession, as NEAR DARK and STRANGE DAYS explicitly tie these two together. The centrality of the wars on drugs and the battle for recovery seemed to re-animate genre films and spur aesthetic innovation, making obsessiveness and the pleasurable committment to self destructive behavior a common theme in the action cinema of this era.

I’d call it obsession rather than addiction, but that’s really only a semantic distinction. Otherwise I fully co-sign this. What Bigelow and PTA both get is that melodrama (which formally means “drama with music”) and obsession are totally cinematic: they give you opportunities for florid colors, soundtracks with oomph, big (and often silly) performances, one-liners, and jittering POV shots; both of them take such joy in going all the way with them. There’s probably something to be made of the California connections of both of them; the last thing either one should ever adapt would be Play It As It Lays. They don’t do anything quiet.

The Loveless often feels like a piece of advice for graduate students in composition: if you’re stuck, take the harmonies of one piece and the rhythms of another, and Robert is your father’s brother. The Loveless is an AIP biker film with the color timing of 1981. It has the undeniable virtue, like Kubrick’s first documentary, of being a completed film.

I feel that there is an overlap with Bigelow and Anderson in two significant areas: That of a fascination with melodrama and addiction. Bigelow explores the latter in terms of how the intimacy between characters’points of view and the audience, as established primarily through editing, creates an escalating, adrenaline fueled sense of danger that holds the viewer to the material. Melodrama is defined through aesthetic choices that express the addictive behaviors of her characters, even if those are not specifically related to chemical dependence. Her films following THE LOVELESS, which seems to suffer from a bit too much grad school piss in the filmmakers’ bladder, commit to the premises of film melodrama with complete sincerity and depth

With Anderson, melodramatic conventions can be found in the pitch of the performances rather than on heightening he tension in the plot, with acting itself, and its historical contexts, being brought into play in order to explore and interrogate modern definitions of the self. The rise of the addiction industry, and the often mystical (and material) ways in which self actualization is presented in the discourse of recovery, forms the crux of his tonier, more experimentally esoteric style.

That said, It’s fascinating that Bigelow would begin her filmmaking career with a more formally avant garde piece whereas Anderson’s first feature, HARD EIGHT, is pretty much a straight forward neo-noir and an exercise in directorial control. The latter’s career seems to have followed, to use your words, Kubrick’s mistaken path route, while the former found her voice getting back onto the main highway.

Just as a warning, the Prime copy has a weird section where the video breaks down (which seems to have been baked into the master).