Sex: Male
Birthdate: 06/18/71
Occupation: Retail
Hobbies: Movies, books, coffee, selling merchandise at Amazon.com and Ebay, long walks, long conversations, and anything having to do with my lovely future bride. Ah, yes, avidly collecting DVD's and some VHS.
So where does Jerry at the Movies come from?
Well, I was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, a South American country to the rest of you. I lived there until I was six, moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil, then Canada, New York, New Jersey and New Mexico, and vice versa. By all accounts, I am a Canadian and still have some Spanish in me. I finished high school at Jamaica High School in Queens, New York (have to specify that since people often think I went to school in the Jamaican islands). I went to a few colleges but I never got the Bachelor degree; I only have two associate degrees. The last school I attended was the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (the same school Heather Donahue attended). The professor Peter Rose (an underground experimental filmmaker) made me see the more intellectual side of films and what the film "eye" sees. I shouldn't exclude Dr. Robert Kapsis, former teacher of Queens College, who taught a great course called "Alfred Hitchcock and the Thriller Genre." His class helped me to see the visual side of filmmaking as a particular style.
When did you begin to review movies?
I began reviewing as early as 1982. I started by cutting out newspaper movie advertisements, hanging them on a bulletin board'; return true;" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true;">bulletin board'; return true;" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true;">bulletin board and writing capsule comments with star ratings (one of the first was for the mediocre Lee Horsley pic The Sword and the Sorcerer which I awarded two stars). After a while, I began writing longer reviews totaling a page, sometimes less. By the time I attended Ryan Junior High School, I began writing reviews for the Ryan Voice. I believe my first official published reviews were for Ghostbusters and The Razor's Edge, both starring Bill Murray. When I attended Jamaica High School in Jamaica, Queens, I became the school's first-ever Entertainment Editor, writing reviews and ten-best lists annually. Since those glorious days, I had written and been published (and paid) at Santa Fe Community College and a small-town newspaper in Smithtown, New York called The Village Times. As of now, I maintain my own website with a collection of reviews and essays. I have also given presentations on film luminaries such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Orson Welles at the State University in Stonybrook, New York.
In my spare time, I make films shot on digital video'; return true;" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true;">digital video'; return true;" onmouseout="window.status=''; return true;">digital video, both short and feature-length. I have been doing this as a hobby since 1994.
What are your film inspirations?
The first cinematic images I can recall were from Jaws, 2001, and Lucky Lady. I guess you could say that Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg were my first major inspirations. The image of the shark eating Robert Shaw stayed with me, as did the image of the Star-Child in "2001." In fact, the Star Child and the Mona Lisa portrait were the most frightening images of my childhood. Soon after, I saw the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Luis Bunuel, and I was permanently hooked. Of course, through the late 80's and early 1990, I saw a lot of Hollywood junk and a lot of mainstream popcorn fare (some of these films are illustrated below). I had no shame, I even saw the awful and sporadically funny Brady Bunch Christmas TV movie. But I knew there was a difference between Scenes from a Marriage and Pretty Woman, and so things started to change. I was aware of the change when I kept watching Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy over and over again (I had taped it off of Channel 11 in New York). It was offbeat and compelling, and it was then that I sought out the work of Scorsese. I was soon compelled to watch The Color of Money over and over, not realizing what drove me to watch it again and again. Later came other directors, past and present, but Scorsese is still the most exciting film director since Orson Welles. And Stanley Kubrick still surprises me each time, knowing that I have seen his films innumerable times. But it was Hitchcock and Scorsese who both made me realize the fluidity of camera movements, and when to use them appropriately.
What are some of the greatest films ever made?
Note: These Lists are in no particular order:
Taxi Driver, La Strada, Touch of Evil, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Solaris (1972), A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, GoodFellas, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Exorcist, The Nights of Cabiria, Night and Fog, The Trial (1963), Raging Bull, Andrei Rublev, The Conformist, Un Chien Andalou, Mulholland Dr., Far From Heaven, Drugstore Cowboy, The Graduate, The Tenant, Chinatown, Repulsion, No Country for Old Men, Nosferatu (1922 and 1979), Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Pulp Fiction, Psycho (1960), Rebel Without a Cause, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Crumb, Once Upon a Time in the West, Death and the Maiden, F For Fake, Exotica, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Eraserhead, Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Big Sleep (1946), The Pianist, Meshes in the Afternoon, The Story of Qiu Ju, Jules and Jim, The Age of Innocence, Eyes Wide Shut, Titicut Follies, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Modern Times, JFK (among others).
Other Great Films: Cape Fear (1991), The Stepfather, Happiness, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Empire Strikes Back, Manhattan, Deconstructing Harry, Jackie Brown, Wag the Dog, Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Games, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Crooked Hearts, Manson, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Unforgiven (1992), Bitter Moon, Simon of the Desert, Day For Night, Someone to Love, The Killing, The Magnificent Ambersons, Back to the Future, The Wizard of Oz, La Femme Nikita, Superman I and II, Casino, Heaven Help Us, Carrie, Midnight Run, Knife in the Water, Chasing Amy, THX-1138, Sunset Boulevard, Kiss Me Deadly, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Ghost World, Gangs of New York, The Big Chill, Schindler's List, Frenzy, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Wild at Heart, Heavy, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Alice in Wonderland, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Mean Streets, Bringing Out the Dead, Singles, The Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter, Once Upon a Time in America, Murder on the Orient Express, All About Eve, Adam's Rib, Halloween (1978), Fight Club, Elizabeth, The Thin Red Line, Born on the Fourth of July, American Beauty, The Terminator, Olivier, Olivier, Ju-Dou, Farewell, My Concubine, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Monster, Body Heat, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fargo, Blood Simple, Juno (and many more).
Have there been any films you've unfavorably or favorably reviewed that you later changed your mind about?
Minor digressive answer: I still have reservations about Get Shorty, some early Terry Gilliam films like Time Bandits, and the original The Matrix. As far as "Get Shorty," it has a great John Travolta performance but the film is inert despite a game cast. "Time Bandits" bored the hell out of me (and I've watched it twice). "The Matrix" is a superficial video game to me, and I've tried to watch it again and gain some perspective. Carrie-Anne Moss is great and there are clever, groundbreaking special-effects to be sure but I just don't get it - it is a shallow, comic-book version of existentialism.
Now Kubrick's The Shining was a film I initially hated but grew to love almost twenty years after the fact. It is eerie and unsettling, and I grew to admire Shelley Duvall's emotionally hightened performance. George Romero's Dawn of the Dead is a truly nail-biting experience and has so much satire I missed when I initially viewed it as a kid. It is a definite horror classic and I still don't see how I ever found it boring. Same with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, a film I saw as just being very violent and crudely made. Seeing it again later on, I recognized the black humor and a lively energy (I suppose the ear-slicing moment put me off initially). I suppose when something new comes along, there is always a hesistancy to see whatever greatness exists, even in spades.
I was completely wrong in my slightly favorable review of Hook in 1991. When I first saw it, I had food poisoning so I suppose my judgment was not 100%. Seeing it again later, it was as heavily sugar-coated and numbingly dull as any fairy-tale film I had ever seen (and ugly photography to boot). Being an admirer of Steven Spielberg in general, I was shocked that he made a film as bad as 1941. And as for Rambo III, well, who knows what I was thinking in 1988 but constant explosions and threadbare line readings and a non-existent story are not the ingredients of a solid action film.
Do you watch foreign films?
I definitely do but not as much as I used to. Frankly, the town I live in does not allow for much. Sometimes, the local theatre will show films like Swimming Pool, Croupier, Monsieur Ibrahim, Dirty Pretty Things, With a Friend Like Harry, and so on. I don't go to New York City or the Montgomery Theatre near Princeton as much because of work. But when I lived in Santa Fe, I saw a lot of foreign films including Farewell, My Concubine, Faust, Olivier, Olivier, Bitter Moon, The Story of Qiu Ju, Ju-Dou, the Blue, White, Red trilogy and so on. European, Middle-Eastern, Japanese and other films from other countries sometimes offer an element of surprising the viewer in ways few American films rarely do. If I were to list one of my favorite foreign films in the last few years, it would be Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Theo Angelopolous's Ulysses' Gaze, the latter containing one of the rarest of rarities - a restrained, beautifully controlled performance by Harvey Keitel.
Which recent directors compare to the greats of the past?
There are a lot of talented directors right now. David Fincher is a continuous surprise. First, he helmed the arguably terrific second sequel to Alien called Alien 3, which had the atmosphere and intensity of the original. Then he comes up with the horrific Se7en, the Mamet-like thriller The Game and the highly ingenious Fight Club. He's got guts and glory in equal strokes and knows how to direct a film with pizazz and style better than most. Think of him as the dirtier side of Hitchcock.
Quentin Tarantino makes great movies like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (both redefined film noir and gangster films) but his heart is in the deadpan dialogue of tired characters who are exhausted by life. See Jackie Brown and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 for proof. What he has done is brought back the sparkle of genuine human conversation - it is always a pleasure to hear his characters speak in exquisite monologues that run on forever. And his antiheroes, whether they are thieves, assassins or hit men, hardly ever talk about their work - they talk about records, hamburgers, Superman, you know, the way real people talk. He is the most influential filmmaker of the last decade.
Paul Thomas Anderson has the giddiness and gravitas of a filmmaking pioneer, though he is mostly paying homage. Still, even when you pay homage, as Scorsese and Godard have, you can evoke new stories and characters drawn from personal observation and experience. Hard Eight had the hard-nosed Philip Baker Hall as Sydney, a casino operator who makes amends in his past by being a father figure to a lost soul. Boogie Nights is the GoodFellas of porno filmmaking, the exploration of a world most of us hardly knew. Hard-hitting, satiric, wildly kinetic and extremely brutal (though never quite sexy), it dramatizes that world so well that you feel you are watching a documentary high on acid. Trippy can also help explain the bewildering Magnolia, a riff on Robert Altman's Short Cuts but cutting deeper with vital honesty (and it includes a sea of frogs). A surreal comedy unlike anything I have ever seen, Punch-Drunk Love is Anderson's lightest and most bizarre film, an Adam Sandler film for people who don't like Adam Sandler.
Of all these directors, my favorite is Darren Aronofsky. Aronofsky's Pi and Requiem For a Dream are more than film exercises - they are the work of an accomplished artist who has shown the bowels of darkness with a rare humanity. "Pi" has its minor technical flaws but its subjective look at the chaotic, frenzied mind of its protagonist, a mathematician, evokes true loneliness and desperation in the early 21st century - at times, it is more violent than Scorsese's own trapped antihero in the same big city in "Taxi Driver." Now "Requiem For a Dream" is a tour de force - it is not a film but a force to be reckoned with. It is so disturbing and so emotionally powerful that it lends a new intimacy in the face of lonely souls looking for their next fix. Any film that features such tantalizing work from Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly (who may never be any better in any subsequent film) is also proof of a true actor's director. Aronofsky is a force to be reckoned with.
And, lastly, have there been negative comments about your reviews? And are you part of any film critics society?
I have received negative comments regarding certain reviews, especially "The Matrix" (I received a bulk of hate mail for that one). My favorite negative comment was regarding my review of Scary Movie, a film I completely loathed. Someone said that I hated that film because I never get laid. I do get laid, and it had no bearing on my dislike for that film.
I have tried to be part of the Online Film Critics Society and have recently been rejected by Christopher Null. My style doesn't concide with the society or with filmcritic.com but they did give me constructive criticism. I hope to get paid again for reviewing movies but, even if it doesn't happen, I'll continue to write until the day I die.
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