I’ve been in a Hey! Arnold state of mind the last couple weeks, but I don’t own the dvds [yet]. I do have that dangerous new Netflix insta-watch, so I called my friend Vernal and put the question to him. What movies are about people living in cities the way Hey! Arnold is about city life?
When you need to riff for an extended period of time, you call Vernal. Vernal is king of the extended riff. A riff is variations on a theme, the act of twisting a diamond in the light. It’s not simple bullshitting. Bullshitting is aimless, Sunday morning kind of talk. Riffing is like, poking your tongue at something stuck in a back tooth from all different directions. There’s something there, to be gotten at.
I put the question to Vernal. He needed some more information before lift-off. “Are we talking, like, LA Confidential, Chinatown, that sort of thing?” No, no. Nothing with glamorous people and their high-falutin’ dramas. More like, movies where someone boils a pot of pasta, telephones their cousin, sweeps a stoop–that sort of thing.
And he was off. Here’s Vernal’s partial list of movies [and novels] about small-time city life. Partial because every item came with a lengthy discussion–its merits, flaws, minor plot points, who looked hot in it and are they still hot today–and I needed to sleep early. What did we miss?
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Lost in Yonkers, Brighton Beach Memoirs, any movie set in a New York borough featuring adolescent boys, Diner, The Last Picture Show, George Washington, La Haine, Studs Terkel–Division Street, Nelson Algren–Man With the Golden Arm, Saul Bellow–Adventures of Augie March, any novel set in Depression Era Chicago . . .