The Hip Pocket #51: INTO THE NIGHT

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.

Into the Night
Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, Stacey Pickren, Carmen Argenziano, Andrew Marton, Sue Dugan, Elizabeth Solozano, Dan Aykroyd, Robert Paynter, David Cronenberg, Robert Moberly, John Hostetter, Dick Balduzzi, Richard Franklin, Cal Worthington, Wes Dawn, Christopher George, Ali Madani, Michael Zand, Hadi Sadjadi, Bruce Gramian, John Landis, Hope Clarke, Eric Lee, Jake Steinfeld, Sue Bowser, Waldo Salt, Viola Kates Stimpson, Bruce McGill, Jon Stephen Fink, Dedee Pfeiffer, Rick Baker, Colin Higgins, Kathryn Harrold, Daniel Petrie, David Sonsa, Mark L. Levine, William B. Kaplan, Jonathan Kaufer, Paul Mazursky, Saul Kahan, Rory Barish, Jean Pelton, Jonathan Lynn, Paul Bartel, William S. Taylor, Jim Bentley, Houshang Touzie, Slavka, Erica Sakai, Carl Perkins, Don Siegel, Peggy McIntaggart, Jim Henson, David Bowie, Robert Traynor, Art Evans, Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Jack Arnold, Pete Ellis, Domingo Ambriz, Amy Heckerling, Robert La Bassiere, Yacub Salih, Roger Vadim, John Roberts, Diane Roberts, Reid Smith, Rusdi Lane, Lawrence Kasdan, Richard Farnsworth, Vera Miles, Irene Papas, Hassan Ildari, Zoreh Ramsey, Beulah Quo, Patricia Gaul, Clu Gulager, Jonathan Demme, Tracy Hutchinson, Gene Whittington, Eddy Donno, Carl Gottlieb, Alma Beltran, Forrest J. Ackerman
cinematography by Robert Paynter
music by Ira Newborn
screenplay by Ron Koslow
produced by George Folsey Jr.
directed by John Landis
Rated R
1 hr 55 mins

Ed Okin can’t sleep.

Insomnia is a motherfucker.

I speak from experience. I have had disruptive sleep issues since childhood. I was the only kid in elementary school who knew who Tom Snyder was. I drove my parents nuts. They would often find me awake in the middle of the night, reading a book or playing with Star Wars figures or writing stories, and they would be confounded by it. I’m 56 now, and I can honestly say I’ve only been sleeping like a normal person for the last five or six years, and only with severe medical intervention. It has been a major lifestyle shift for me, and one of the things that has been hardest to get used to is understanding just how broken I was for so long.