I’m all done writing top five lists for the Reader. Last week was my final week on the job, and I’ve had a lot of fun concocting these posts for the last couple years. Hopefully one or two of you enjoyed reading them. If you’d like to go back and see the others, they’re archived here.
3. Targets (1968) A low-budget, down and dirty film, partly made up of leftover footage from Roger Corman’s Napoleonic-era thriller The Terror. There’s no whimsy or romance here, just an uncharacteristically sleazy grindhouse style and plenty of references to German expressionism and old monster movies, not to mention Corman’s filmography. It’s the Bogdanovich film that’s least like the others, which is probably why I like it so much.
2. Texasville (1990) More than just a sequel to The Last Picture Show, this comedy is the director’s reevaluation of his own style and career. In revisiting the familiar sights and sounds of his most famous film, Bogdanovich conveys unique feelings of longing and nostalgia, rendered in wholly cinematic terms. As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes in his capsule, there aren’t any obvious references to other movies here, but the film’s socially conscious depiction of women in control and men struggling to keep up make it the stuff of Howard Hawks and Leo McCarey.
