The Hip Pocket #50: RUSH

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.

Rush
Jason Patric, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sam Elliott, Max Perlich, Gregg Allman, Tony Frank, William Sadler, Special K. McCray, Dennis Letts, Dennis Burkley, Glenn Wilson, Jimmy Ray Pickens, Barbara Lasater, Toni Pilgreen, Merrill Connally, Connie Cooper, Cynthia Dale Scott, John Ray Harrison, Michael Kirkland, Willie Ellison, Ron Kern, Thomas Rosales Jr., Suzanne Savoy, Ken Stadler, Gene Nash, Freddy Joe Odiorne, Niles Caldwell, Brandon Smith, Jerry King, Blue Deckert, Dell Gibson, Charlie Terrell, Hawke Dixon, James Phillips, Morad, Doug Pryzbocki
cinematography by Kenneth MacMillan
music by Eric Clapton
written by Pete Dexter
based on the book by Kim Wozencraft
produced by Richard D. Zanuck
directed by Lili Fini Zanuck
Rated R
2 hrs

Two undercover narcotics officers in rural Texas struggle with addictions, ethics, and the demands of their superiors.

If you’d asked me in the early ‘90s who I thought the best working actors were, I’m fairly sure I would have included Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patric on that very short list.

Part of it was my age at the time. I was excited by younger actors making inroads, and I felt like Leigh in particular had been in beast mode for a while. She’s fantastic in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and she made a strong impression in both Flesh + Blood (a completely batshit movie) and The Hitcher (one of the craziest deaths of the ‘80s). She struggled through a fistful of forgettable fare like Under Cover and Heart of Midnight for a few years before landing the role of Tralala in Last Exit to Brooklyn. One of the bleakest film experiences of the ‘80s, that film made it clear that she was willing to go anywhere with the right filmmaker. I think she’s phenomenal in Miami Blues, a film I suspect we will discuss at some point either on the show or in this column, and the very next year, she co-starred in this film with Patric, who had just given a mind-blowing performance in the small and criminally underseen After Dark, My Sweet. I was high on both of them when this rolled around, so Rush was an event in the McWeeny household.