The New Classics - Meek's Cutoff

The New Classics is a weekly series by Michael Cusumano, looking at great films of the 21st century through the lens of a single selected scene. 

Scene: Emily takes charge
The lost pioneers in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff travel with a bird in a cage dangling from the back of a covered wagon. It is a token of happier days, when nature was an ornament that decorated your home, not a force that drained the life from you with its punishing distances and barren terrain.

More than a sad joke, the little yellow parakeet also functions as a poignant symbol for the codes of society the pioneers carry with them into the wilderness, codes which become increasingly absurd in the context of their predicament. Lost, dying from thirst, and led by a guide who is either a charlatan or a mad man, the wagon train’s men still make sure to isolate themselves from their wives when discussing strategy.

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The New Classics - The Hurt Locker

Michael Cusumano here to look back on one of the few classics about the Iraq War on the 10th anniversary of its release. 

Scene: The Daisy Chain Bomb
When Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker hit theaters in the Summer of 2009 it was sold as an all-thrills, zero-politics experience. Here, the ads promised, was a film that wasn’t going to go all Valley of Elah on you with ponderous anti-war messages. The trio of soldiers that make up the film’s central bomb disposal unit never discuss politics. They defuse the bombs, they don’t get to hung up on why they are there in the first place. At no point do any of them sigh during a low moment and wonder, “Man, I don’t even know what we’re doing here...”

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The New Classics - 20th Century Women

Michael Cusumano here to thank you for making this post part of your own personal Mike Mills film today. I'm honored.

image via "books in movies"

To watch a Mike Mills movie is to continually ask, “Why don’t more people make movies with this much freedom?” 

His films deploy everything from news clips to rotating narrators to archival footage from a century ago. The screenplay will jump backwards in time, skimming through the characters’ biographies, or forwards to glimpse the details of their death. The focus can zoom in to the most granular details or out to encompass the entire cosmos. I doubt he will ever make a film that doesn’t include a shot of the stars. At least I hope he doesn’t... 

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The New Classics - Blue Ruin

Michael Cusumano here to nominate a New Classic that doesn't get discussed much around these parts.

Scene: Self-surgery
Nolan’s Batman trilogy is supposed to be the grounded version of the Bruce Wayne mythology, but really, that movie arrived eight years later in the form of Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin.  

Like Bruce Wayne, Blue Ruin’s Dwight Evans (played memorably by Macon Blair) finds himself unable to process the murder of his parents. Unlike the Caped Crusader however, the trauma doesn’t set him on the path to becoming a crime-fighting ninja, so much as it leaves him a haunted vagrant who survives by trash-picking down by the boardwalk. When he embarks on a spree of vigilante retribution, Dwight has no lofty ideas about the betterment of society. It’s more of an indirect suicide attempt... 

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The New Classics - Happy-Go-Lucky

Michael Cusumano here to discuss a scene I find myself thinking about all the time.

 

Scene: Scott's meltdown
When you pause to consider how mundane the actual events of Mike Leigh’s films usually are, it’s funny to think how many moments from them lodge permanently in the memory.  Barely a weekend goes by that I don’t see some kind of world-ending cataclysm portrayed in expansively budgeted detail and what does my brain return to over and over again? Lesley Manville in Another Year retreating to her glass of white wine or David Thewlis in Naked stalking a security guard through the dark to harangue him about the meaning of life.

The famous Mike Leigh technique of crafting screenplays from extensive improvisations yields scenes that unfold with the convinction of real life...

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