Category: The Unsung

Rahad Jackson is a survivor. Of all the characters in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights – the doomed, the damned, the disturbingly well-endowed – he’s one of the few one can imagine emerging from the 1980’s intact.

Billy Curtis, God rest his soul, was a fucking legend. Not just a midget legend, mind you, but a legend in his own right, four-foot-two stature be damned.

In a movie that, like Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, accurately validates the idea that the best stories are not about the ascent, but rather the fall, the ultimate privilege is in the further realization that absent the broken, we’d have no real stories to tell.

We’ve all known someone like her. Perhaps even dated one or two. Dinner and a movie and an unending monologue. The chosen few, marriage and family, with the hours passing like centuries. Museum Girl.

In addition to ushering in the unchecked era of narcissistic self-regard, mushy, feminized therapeutic healing, and an undying cynicism about the Academy Awards, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People remains one of cinema’s undisputed heavyweights of dubious character loyalties and directorial sympathies

Sydney Pollack is, for my money, the greatest actor who just happened to be a world class director. In addition to helming Tootsie, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Three Days of the Condor, and Jeremiah Johnson, he also collected an Academy Award, even if it was for a film (Out of Africa) that didn’t quite…

I’ve only seen her twice, but I’ve never been more in love. I fell hard after seeing her in 1972’s Fat City, a film so unrelentingly perfect, I wanted to bottle the emotion and save it for an inevitable downturn in mood.

There are dogs and there are dogs, but there’s only one Reuben. An Old English Sheepdog of the most supreme vintage, Reuben (of 1983’s Reuben, Reuben.

He is everyone and no one. A man of mystery, never to be pigeonholed or defined, yet so real, so tangible, he all but stands in for every G-man who ever lived. Soldier, bureaucrat, and yes, “civilian” (as he’s so named in the credits)