Notice to Blockbuster

My favorite place to rent videos has this important advantage over your neighborhood megacorp: they use the categories that people who like movies use.

If you want to watch a James Bond movie, there's a shelf of James Bond movies. You don't have to go wandering through the Action section trying to remember if On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the one with George Lazenby or the one with Diana Rigg. They're all right there. Woody Allen is a category. Local-made is a category. They think like I think.

Screw "Action". Screw "Drama". We need categories that make sense to us. Here's my top five movie genres:

Catholic Horror
Catholic Horror is any movie that borrows the laws for its in-movie world from the Catholics. We're talking Exorcist, Devil's Advocate, Rosemary's Baby, that sort of thing. (Note that although Carrie had a couple of Catholics in it, it was a high-school horror movie. Totally different.)

In a place where anything is worthy of a sequel if you don't have to think about it too much, it makes a sort of Hollywood sense to just lift your world from a popular, established religion instead.

Heist Movies
Every man wants to be part of a heist. If a heist movie comes out, I'm probably going to watch it.

Rififi and Le Cercle Rouge are my favorite French heist films, but, because they're French, it all has to end in tears. There's a real sense of joy in American heist films. We love being along with the bad guys.

Ocean's 11 was fun. Heist was an interesting heist movie because the thieves took the quite rational step of not talking about the crime. Heat instantly became the Pacino/De Niro heist movie. I remember it came out at the same time as a bunch of other three-hour movies and I was in three-hour movie heaven. I think I might have even watched it twice.

Objectively? The best American heist movie of all of all time? Die Hard. By far. Full stop.

The Die Hard novel didn't even have a heist. It was movie-making genius John McTiernan who realized that for the audience to have fun, it had to be able to enjoy watching the villains be villains. It's hard to enjoy a bunch of terrorists being terrorists for terror's sake. The moment they're after some money, we Americans feel like we can relate to them.

McTiernan understood the sheer joy of the Heist movie. He even went so far as to make the movie's theme song "Ode to Joy." Ladies and gentlemen, that is movie-making genius.

New York Movies
I was born in Albert Einstein hospital in the Bronx, lived in Scarsdale from zero to five, then moved to sunny South Texas. The big significance of zero to five was that I felt like a New Yorker in exile until 11 or 12. I remember being shocked at 10 that I'd spent as much time living in Texas as I had living in New York, and that's probably the clearest memory of being 10 that I have.

I didn't even really know anything about New York until I met some kids from there in summer camp and started visiting them every few years. Most of what I knew about New York came from New York movies.

The opening sequence of Manhattan made me cry, but then Woody Allen is really his own category. There's French Connection. There's Taxi Driver. But as far as I'm concerned, the quintessential New York movie is Ghost Busters.


Ghost Busters was a childhood obsession - I too was a ghost buster for Halloween - and it's probably the reason I'm writing a New York movie right now. There was all this New York stuff: these quirky people I felt like I could relate to, guys starting a business in a cool New York space, the tough-as-nails girl next door. At the beginning of the movie, they even walk through America's greatest library in the course of everyday business, just like I do now. But the most New York thing about Ghost Busters was Comedy Central's Official Biggest Smartass of All Time, Bill Murray.

Harold Ramis said his character was the brain of the Ghostbusters, Danny Ackroyd was the heart and Murray was the mouth. Bill Murray had the most New York attitude of anyone I'd seen on film before. This idea of someone who can't shut up even when it's clear it can only make a situation worse, that's what makes Ghost Busters my favorite New York movie.

Sequels
There are really two categories here: Good Sequels and Bad Sequels. A good sequel expands the world of the original movie, like if your original characters leave the setting of the first movie and head to the outside world, or you introduce Tina Turner to the environment. There are 2.6 million opinions out there about this already, so enough said.

The 80s Movies You Like / The 80s Movies Your Girlfriend Likes
You like Weird Science. She likes Pretty in Pink. She likes Labyrinth. You say it's time for her to grow up and see The Man Who Fell to Earth. She says she likes Breakfast Club, and besides The Man Who Fell to Earth was from 1976. You say you like Rocky IV. She says she likes Sixteen Candles, and she doesn't believe you really like Rocky IV, she thinks you're just saying that. You insist you like Rocky IV, and also Earth Girls Are Easy. She suggests you may be thinking of Rocky III. You say you aren't thinking of Rocky III, you were thinking about Rocky IV like you said you were, and why is she always acting this way? She throws your copy of Short Circuit out the window, and then she starts to say she likes either Flashdance or Footloose, but you'll never know because before she can finish saying anything you punch her in the mouth. What's the solution to this problem?

You both need to watch Die Hard and shut the fuck up.