I'm in a New York state of Cinema

For me Basquiat is the movie that encompasses what I think of when I think of New York. Excess, eccentricity and art.

Basquiat (1996) is a great one for the Bohemian SoHo artist set. For sure. Amazing performance by Jeffrey Wright in the title role. It was directed by Julian Schnabel, who of course was very much a part of that scene himself as an artist in his own right from the '70s through the '90s. Another look at the dark side of that era I like is I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) with Lili Taylor as Valerie Jean Solanas. Casting David Bowie as Warhol in Basquiat was genius and lots of fun, but I think Jared Harris' portrayal in I Shot is the definitive statement thus far...you know, if you don't count Warhol himself. I haven't seen Factory Girl yet so I don't know how Guy Pearce handled the part, but Harris has set the bar very high.


"It's art. You give it up, you were never an artist in the first place."

My favorite Manhattan artist flick is Martin Scorsese's segment of New York Stories, "Life Lessons". It's a fictional artist rather than a biopic, but I think it captures that obsessive/destructive aspect of creation and really has a great feel for the New York art scene in the '80s. I've never been to a working artist's SoHo loft, but I feel like I have thanks to Scorsese's piece. It has one of Nick Nolte's best performances as painter Lionel Dobie, and Rosanna Arquette is great too as his most recent assistant/muse. Their emotionally unhealthy relationship that both drives him crazy and fuels his art is very well examined in the forty-or-so minute running time. All the little textures and digs, like Steve Buscemi's Performance Artist (or as Dobie refers to him, "You mean the comedian?"), really feel spot-on. Novelist and screenwriter Richard Price (The Wanderers, The Color of Money, Mad Dog & Glory, Clockers) wrote the screenplay (and has a cameo in the final party scene) and did a great job of crystallizing the essence of the pretentious/selfish/brilliant/sincere/abusive/redemptive artist. Specifically the New York artist.

"Life Lessons" is too often overlooked in Scorsese's filmography. Partially because of its length, I suppose, and chiefly because it's the only decent piece in that anthology (Woody Allen's "Odepus Wrecks" is pretty minor stuff and Coppola's "Life without Zoe" is damn near unwatchable it's so bad). But "Life Lessons" is definitely one of my favorite New York movies.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

So nobody else has any thoughts about cinematic New York City, huh?

I've never been to America, but when I do go I'd want New York to be the first place I visit.

I remember being a kid and wanting to stay in New York City on my own like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2, sleep at the Plaza Hotel and shop at Duncan's Toy Chest. Ever since watching that film I've pretty much been fascinated by the place.

Even the dark themes of Taxi Driver don't put me off from going. It just seems like the coolest place in the world. That's the impression I get from the movies, anyway.

When I think of New York I don't think of the Statue of Libery or the Empire State building, I think of its streets. If I ever do go, I'd be happy to walk around and just be there. I'm sure I wouldn't need to visit any sites to have a good time.

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I'm a NYer born and raised, so this has come up a lot at parties and such. I tell my friends that to me there are lots of movies filmed there, but it's not a "New York movie" unless the city itself works as a character.

Arthur is a great example of course, but I'm a little biased towards it because all the old footage brings back a lot of memories for me. Liza Minelli's apartment, in fact, was my friend Janet's house about ten blocks away. We went to grade school together so I remember when they started filming. We were all very excited!

The Warriors was great because in the seventies we really did have gangs like these running around. Surely not as colorful as the baseball bat-toting mimes, but you get the picture.

When I was a teenager we used to sit in the park late at night talking about Escape Form New York as a sort of prophecy of how things would be one day. It finally came true on 9/11.

To fully understand After Hours, you would have had to walk from downtown Manhattan to the Lower East Side where the streets go from numbers to letters. It was literally like entering another world, and every screwball scenario in the movie was actually quite believable.

But for whatever reason my personal favorite is Quick Change. When it's on, half the time my non-NYer friends can't figure out what I keep laughing at.



I suddenly feel inspired to round out my movie collection, for when I get homesick. Thanks for starting this thread!

I love Quick Change (1990). One of my favorite and most rewatchable comedies. I believe I have the entire thing memorized and have seen it at least a hundred times. At least. The city is definitely a character there. For those who haven't seen it (well, go rent it immediately!), Bill Murray, Geena Davis and Randy Quaid plan and execute a brilliant bank robbery, and the picture starts as a kind of comedic Dog Day Afternoon. Then they get out of the bank and outsmart the cops...only to find their larger getaway stalled at every turn by the city of New York and its cranky, sarcastic citizens. I love, love, love this movie. Co-directed by Murray, it's actually a remake of a Canadian film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo set in Montreal I've never been able to get a hold of.

"You know, you could have given us help, but you've given us so much more."

Ooo! I saw Quick Change as a kid and kinda liked it, but remember not "getting" all of it (it was quite a long time ago). I've been meaning to see it again, as I've forgotten enough to enjoy it as if it were virtually new to me. This was the kick in the butt I needed.

Off to the Netflix Queue I go...gracias.

Ok for me it is The opening scenes of Working Girl


I have never been to New York I want to one day

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I've never been to New York (i'm quite a while away here in Australia), but watching films such as Taxi Driver & Midnight Cowboy painted a very dark picture of what it must of been like in the 60s-70's.

I have seen many relationship dramas set there that show the place as a busy metropolis full of people, such as The Sidewalks of New York. It becomes familiar as a setting after a while, it really does feel like you know the place somehow through film.

My first thought of NYC is certainly Midnight Cowboy. However, there is another, earlier movie which paints a picture of the Big Apple in similar terms, and I find it to be nearly as shattering as MC. That movie would be Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker. I don't want to just barrel into it and shove it down your throats, but that's a major achievement to me, especailly since I think it's both Lumet's and Rod Steiger's best work. What does anybody think of this film?

P.S. Hi, Holden.

I've never seen The Pawnbroker. But it must be one hell of a film if you think it's Lumet's best work. I'll have to check that one out.

I can't believe I forgot about Men In Black!



For those of you that didn't grow up in Queens: there really was a rumor about an alien landing in Flushing Meadow Park...except this was around 1989 or so. Me and my friends even walked over there to look for the craters. Whoever wrote this really knew their lore!

The Freshman
1990, Andrew Bergman
"I want you to take this opportunity. Totally legitimate work for one thousand dollars a week. And I know that you're not gonna disappoint me."

Another one of my favorite New York City comedies is The Freshman, writer/director Andrew Bergman's (The In-Laws, Fletch) wonderfully bizarre mix of silliness and heart about a young NYU freshman film student (Matthew Broderick) who becomes involved with apparent Underworld dealings in the form of endangered species being peddled as food for rich and amoral connoisseurs, all under the watch of a man who looks like he's straight out of The Godfather - played by none other than Marlon Brando himself, deliciously spoofing his own famous role! The whole cast is perfect, especially the late, great Bruno Kirby (who was in The Godfather Part II) but also Penelope Ann Miller's best role ever and great supporting parts for Frank Whaley, B.D. Wong, Maximilian Schell and even "The Jeffersons" Paul Benedict as a pretentious film school professor.

Playing off of the New York of The Godfather, but for a twisted and ultimately very sweet comic fable with so many great moments and performances, it is such a blast. Brilliantly using the neighborhoods of Greenwich Village and Little Italy in their movie contexts; no reality, but the streets of lower Manhattan as cinema itself. The whole project is done with such charm and wit, I can't help but pop this one in the DVD player once or twice a year. And as if opening the door to any small club or restaurant on Mulberry, Hester or Grand you wouldn't already be looking around for Don Corleone, now you also have to scan for the framed picture of Mussolini and Carmine Sabatini cracking walnuts with his bare hands.

The best movie ever starring NYC as herself was a black-&-white crime noir shot about 1952 on the city's own streets--The Naked City. This was resurrected for television as series of the same name in the 1960s. Both the film and the weekly TV series always ended with the same line--"There are 5 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." The number may have been higher or lower depending on the period population, but every scene was filmed on the streets or at actual city locations. All of this was well before NYPD Blue and similar "true-to-life" cop shows.

The Naked City was 1948, actually (the television series ran from 1958-1963). Great prototypical Noir from Jules Dassin (Rififi, Night and the City), one of the first pictures to so strikingly use the streets of New York on location rather than faking it in the Hollwywood studios and backlots, from the depths of the actual City Morgue to the heights of the Williamsburg Bridge.

In the U.S. this was recently released on DVD (finally) by the fine folks at Criterion.

One of my favorite films depicting the soul of the city through the triumphs and struggles of its inhabitants is The Goodbye Girl (1977, Herbert Ross, dir.).

Dreyfuss' frenetic, Oscar-winning performance as a struggling way-off-Broadway actor combined with the tenaciousness of Mason and Cummings' characters (plus the syrupy but endearing hit by David Gates) made for a film that connected with me as a kid when my family was enduring similar relational turmoil. Plus it helped that Quinn Cummings was only two years older that I was, so I thought she was pretty cute stuff .

The sense of comedic resiliency that exudes from the story matches that of what I've noted of New York. It never takes itself too seriously to the point where it can't exhibit a heart of admirable depth.

I worked as an extra on The Goodbye Girl. Never was able to spot myself in it, but then again I haven't tried since before the advent of the DVD. Who knows if the scene even made it into the film. I was like 8 years old!

Now that's pretty sweet!

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The French Connection
1971, William Friedkin
"All right! You put a shiv in my partner. You know what that means? Goddamnit!!! All winter long I got to listen to him gripe about his bowling scores. Now I'm gonna bust your ass for those three bags and I'm gonna nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie."

Now that the cold of the winter months is setting in (though thankfully now that I'm in the Pacific Northwest it isn't nearly as cold and bitter), I gotta mention The French Connection. So many things I love about this movie, from Hackman's performance to the rightfully famous chase under the elevated train and that amazingly bleak and ambiguous ending, but one of the ingredients that makes it so wonderful is its portrayal of New York City, especially New York City in the winter. You can just feel how damn cold it is in scenes like the stakeout at the beginning of the movie, with Hackman's Popeye Doyle disguised as a Salvation Army Santa Claus, and the other stakeouts that follow in tracking Frog One, Sal Boca and the others in the drug traffiking conspiracy they luck into. NYC was at a notorious low point in the 1970s in regards to the crime rate and the general uncleanliness of the streets, and while Death Wish plays off the paranoia and fears of that era The French Connection does the best job at replicating it in an almost documentary-like fashion. Director William Friedkin and his cinematographer Owen Roizman (Owen also shot the great '70s NYC pieces Three Days of the Condor, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Network) capture every detail, from the garbage to the very sunlight that just feels absolutely authentic. And even without ever seeing it snow in the movie, you know it is bitter, bone-chilling, chest-compressing cold.