Elvis Mitchell

“Could you do one of these without a Cassavetes of some sort? Why not Husbands? Why not? Because I can't think of anything more fun than the thing of the clash of acting styles that go on in this. Everybody is fighting for territory. You can almost, if you listen closely, hear John Cassavetes's maniacal cackle watching these guys go nose to nose, tear duct to tear duct with each other.”

“How about Dexter Gordon in his film debut in this film, who was one of the most decent people you would ever meet, such a wonderful soul. I had many dinners at festivals around the world with him. And Tavernier tells a great story about casting Martin Scorsese in this film, saying, "You know, I said, 'You know, Marty, I want someone like you who is the soul of decency, but ruthless.' And Marty goes, 'I can do that.'", so he's sort of an impresario on this. But the Dexter Gordon performance, and Bertrand was smart enough to let Dexter shape the performance because he had written one thing on paper and Dexter kind of goes, "Black people don't talk like this." "Dexter, how do they talk?" "Let me show you." And it works in performance. And Oscar win for the Herbie Hancock score.”

“Oh, To Sleep with Anger. Every Burnett film feels, has a sense of being lived in, but nothing feels staged. You can feel that intersection of American Black life and Italian neorealism and also the Nouvelle Vague. I can't think of anyone who's more masterly about that kind of thing, about unobtrusive, generous filmmaking than Charles Burnett.”

“Here's a film that finally exists on home video. You talk about a film that probably has impacted as many filmmakers of color as any movie the last 40 years, it would be this one. And, just the chemistry between the two leads and the way music is used, and maybe probably one of the first big budget films that really bring the sort of slam poetry as a kind of emotional evocation. The director should have surfaced again. You can't help but see this title and think, what was in the establishment that kept him from working? Because clearly he had the stuff to make many, many movies, and I'm hoping there's a big one from him around the corner.”

“My hands are shaking because I think that spirit of anxiety passes along when you're holding up The Parallax View. I got the title in that time. It's the Pakula film that to me feels the least studied. You sort of feel a kind of control of the camera in a lot of his films, and this one feels like he's really trying to bring the filmmaking of someone like Fred Wiseman or D. A. Pennebaker, a lot of the documentary filmmaking. He wants us to feel the anxiety in each frame.”

“Would you say, Miller's Crossing-wise, would there be a, a Criterion Closet without a Coen brothers film in it? I have a specific love for this movie because, as a comics person, I always thought it was kind of the version of Will Eisner's The Spirit. That if you did The Spirit, this would be it. Gabriel Byrne's always being punched in the head, he wears his hat low covering his eyes, and at the end he turns out to be a little bit smarter than almost everybody else, except for Marcia Gay Harden. There's an action sequence in this, a violent sequence actually, that's almost like a musical number, where a group of thugs think they're going to take out Albert Finney, and he puts his cigar down to dispatch them. At the end of the sequence, he picks up his cigar and finishes it. As someone who likes both Will Eisner and cigars, I can't recommend Miller's Crossing more highly. By the way, when I asked them about that, they went, "Who is Will Eisner?", they had no idea what I was talking about. And I said, "Well, it seems kind of Three Stooges." "Oh yeah!" Because he's getting dope-slapped all the time. "Yes, of course it seems like The Three Stooges."”

“The Essential Films of Melvin Van Peebles is appropriately this. If you're looking online to pick up one of these things, that you should have it. But also what's really great about these movies is that they're really about the spirit of independent filmmaking. That Melvin recognized the way to, if you were a person of color, to promote your film was to make it independent rather than a Black film, which means you'd be left in the margins. Instead, he made it about the selling of the film. And of course, the great thing that we talk about in the documentary I just made, which will be on Netflix, it's called, Is That Black Enough for You?!? Is that Melvin was smart enough to realize that rather than pay to submit his film to the MPAA, the X rating wasn't copyrighted. So he just slapped it on himself and said, "Rated X by an all-white jury," and effectively hijacked it, and also in effect created the XXX rating because everybody would say, "Well, we'll put an X on ours too and call it triple X and quadruple X."”