Dazed and Confused follows a bunch of high school stoners through the end of one particular school year in the 1970s.
Matthew McConaughey is the best-known star - and this movie is where his "all right, all right, all right" catchphrase comes from - but loads of other recognizable actors are packed in there as well. As for the plot, there isn't much of one; it's just a bunch of kids doing dumb kid things. But it does capture a specific combination of age and culture in America.
While MMc may never escape the aforementioned "all right, all right, all right,"
Tom Cruise will never escape the scene from
Risky Business where he slides into frame in his tighty-whities, button down, and socks singing "
Old Time Rock and Roll" into various household implements. And he shouldn't want to escape it, because it's iconic! A Chicago kid whose parents leave him home alone goes dancing around the house to celebrate his freedom? It doesn't get much more American than that. In fact, two other
similar stories spring to mind, and I'm sure there are others.
Okay, enough of Chicago. Let's go to New York, one of my favorites and the fifth main character in the
Sex and the City franchise.
Sex and the City: The Movie remains set primarily in NYC and has some really great backdrops: the iconic main branch of the
New York Public Library, a beautiful and expansive apartment that no one can actually afford,
the Met,
MoMA, the
Brooklyn Bridge, the
Ladies Pavilion in Central Park, and loads of others (
this site has a pretty comprehensive list). The story is more of the same from the show, with the added delight of Louise from St. Louis, played by
Jennifer Hudson, and her fantastic song "
All Dressed in Love."
It's too much to say that
Live Free or Die Hard is another New York City movie, but it does involve NYPD stalwart John McClain (
Bruce Willis in perhaps his most iconic role) who is out to save America ... yet again. This time, some hacker baddies are taking down computer systems and financial networks all over the country and McClain comes to the rescue yet again, saving his estranged daughter along the way. And if that's not a classic story of redemption, McClain style, I don't know what is.
Dark Waters is the next in a long line of based-on-a-true-story movies which expose corporate greed and malfeasance. There was
A Civil Action,
Erin Brockovich,
Flash of Genius, and the list goes on.
Dark Waters' hero, played by
Mark Ruffalo (who put on some serious weight for the role), turns against his own law firm to go after DuPont for dumping chemicals into groundwater which is killing local livestock and poisoning the people in the nearby town. What's not American about that story? Sadly, if it weren't so true to life, there wouldn't be nearly so many versions of what is basically the same movie.
I started watching
Miracle, and I was about 15 minutes in before I realized I may have seen it before. Or perhaps I was confusing it with another come-from-behind, everybody-loves-an-underdog sports movie. No matter, because
I love an underdog sports movie, so I watched it (perhaps again) regardless. And boy is it a good one!
Kurt Russell plays Herb, the coach of the 1980 USA men's hockey team that's going to the Olympics which, that year, were in Lake Placid, NY. The kids he's coaching are mostly college players, young guys who don't have a lot of experience playing together (you'll recognize a lot of the actors). Their big rival is the team from the USSR, which is both more experienced and better trained at playing together. You layer all the lingering Cold War animosities on top of that, and it turns out that Herb and his little college players had quite a hill to climb. But climb it they did.
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