The Hip Pocket #44: THE 'BURBS

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

The ‘Burbs
Tom Hanks, Bruce Dern, Carrie Fisher, Rick Ducommun, Corey Feldman, Wendy Schaal, Henry Gibson, Theodore Gottlieb, Courtney Gains, Gale Gordon, Dick Miller, Robert Picardo, Cory Danziger, Franklyn Ajaye, Rance Howard, Heather Haase, Nicky Katt, Billy Stevenson, Gary Hays, Kevin Gage, Dana Olsen, Brenda Benner, Patrika Darbo
cinematography by Robert M. Stevens
music by Jerry Goldsmith
screenplay by Dana Olsen
produced by Larry Brezner and Michael Finnell
directed by Joe Dante
Rated PG
1 hr 42 mins

A group of neighbors become convinced the new family on the block is harboring a terrible secret, and work themselves into a frenzy trying to prove it.

I presume there will be a large number of Joe Dante films on this list eventually. I find his entire filmography comforting in a way that is hard to explain. He’s a pop culture sponge, the Quentin Tarantino of his generation, and his films feel to me like he is just barely to contain all of the joy of storytelling inside his frame. Joe Dante in real life is exactly the same, a delightful connoisseur of all kinds of art, both high and low, able to blend it all up and then put together something that is all his, even though you can feel how informed it is by everything he loves.

Part of what I find interesting about how much you can feel him in his movies is that he’s not really a writer. He works from other people’s scripts, and his gift is finding material that allows him room to still put his own distinct signature on it. He works with screenwriters to help shape things, but he’s not the kind of director who steamrolls a writer. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Joe, and he gave exactly the kind of notes you want someone to give you. Asking questions, prompting you to find your own answers. I’m sure that was valuable for him on The ‘Burbs, a film that started production on the day a WGA strike began, meaning Dante had to shoot only what Dana Olsen wrote before the shoot, and there were no rewrites at all on-set.