Jules and JimFor many years, Nashville Scene editor and Middle Tennessee native Jim Ridley was a constant fixture at The Belcourt. A true talent, Jim was an exceptionally gifted journalist and critic, respected for his work with the Scene, where he was a writer and editor for well over two decades. In April, Jim died suddenly at age 50. But his passion for film, a passion that drove our arts community to greater heights and very directly played a role in saving The Belcourt from the brink of demise, lives on in those of us who knew him and those of us who read him.
For the Belcourt’s Jewels and Jim series — named for François Truffaut’s 1962 masterpiece Jules and Jim, one of Ridley’s longtime favorites — several of Jim’s friends, family members and fellow Belcourt-frequenting cinephiles picked out films to pay homage to the man. These are films that Jim loved, films you might have found him discussing as he held court in The Belcourt’s lobby late at night after a screening.
Rather than tell you why each film was special to Jim and why each should be special to all lovers of film, we figured we ought just let the man speak for himself. Below you’ll find the full Jewels and Jim schedule, complete with excerpts — where available — from Jim’s own writing.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 23
7 p.m.: Mean Streets
Directed by Martin Scorsese, USA, 1973, R, 112 min., 35mm
The prototype of the [“what it’s like for guys to be friends”] genre is Mean Streets, which is a gangster movie in the classic tradition. But it’s also a neo-realist account of a bunch of guys hanging out: the one buddy who drags you down, and the one buddy who feels compelled to look out for everyone else, and the one buddy who’s the badass. And there’s always a tension that these friendships are on the verge of something deeper, which is why the characters are all so anti-gay. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Sept. 21, 2000)
9:10 p.m.: Pulp Fiction
Directed by Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1994, R, 153 min., 35mm
We'll admit there was a period in the post-Pulp ’90s where the movie's influence seemed to act on indie filmmakers like a neurotoxin — a neurotoxin that left characters babbling about pop-culture flotsam, made "hit man" look like America's No. 1 career path, and encouraged a lot of jokey sadism. But in the long run, the spate of terrible what-hath-QT-wrought imitations like Mad Dog Time only pointed out by grim demonstration what made Tarantino's original so distinctive: his willingness to dwell in the moment with his characters; his skill at teasing out a story; his use of genre constructs as a kind of action-figure universe, where characters are able to slip from gangster movies to musicals to boxing dramas with the ease of LEGO people. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Feb. 10, 2015)
Midnight: The Warriors
The WarriorsDirected by Walter Hill, USA, 1979, R, 92 min., DCP
The ne plus ultra of comic-book cinema isn't a comic-book adaptation: It's Walter Hill's exhilarating 1978 reimagining of The Odyssey set in untamed pre-Giuliani New York, where a gang framed for the murder of a charismatic would-be ruler must bop its way home to Coney Island across miles of hostile territory. (Back in ’78, my friends and I thought Michael Beck's Swan was the last word in big-screen badassery — and next thing we knew, he was roller-skating with Olivia Newton-John and a bunch of cartoon fish in Xanadu.) In this immersive fantasy of urban peril — a template for 30 subsequent years of video games; it's basically Grand Theft Auto on foot — the city is one big interstitial interrupted by boldly stylized encounters with mythic foes: the siren-like Lizzies, the skinhead Turnbull AC's and, best of all, the glam-rock, bat-swinging Baseball Furies. Hill, the movies' poet of the cleanly thrown punch, stages every beatdown and bust-up with such exultance in motion you can practically feel the swoosh of whizzing fists. I love this movie. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Sept. 25, 2008)
SATURDAY, SEPT. 24
10 a.m.: His Girl Friday
Directed by Howard Hawks, USA, 1940, NR, 92 min., 35mm
Preceded by animated short “Duck Amuck” (Directed by Chuck Jones, 1953, 7 min.)
If you tell me, “I’ve seen this on TV,” I will seal you up in a rolltop desk like Cary Grant’s conniving editor Walter Burns and shoot it full of holes. Seeing Howard Hawks’ voracious newsroom farce in a theater means the difference between joining 200 other people in convulsive laughter and watching alone bleary-eyed in the late-morning hours between Botox infomercials. Besides, at some point in his life everyone should see Cary Grant on the big screen. It’s like encountering the buzzing enormity of a Jackson Pollock canvas after you’ve only seen a postcard. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Jan. 24, 2011)
12:30 p.m.: Sullivan’s Travels
Directed by Preston Sturges, USA, 1941, NR, 90 min., 35mm
We can think of few films that cheer us up more than Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. … If you want to hear how movie dialogue is supposed to crackle, [watch the “with a little sex in it” scene]. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (March 4, 2010)
2:25 p.m.: Once Upon a Time in the West
Directed by Sergio Leone, Italy, 1968, PG-13, 175 min., 4k DCP
Over the years, I've found something more to appreciate every time I've seen Once Upon a Time in the West. But every time, it leaves me feeling like an awestruck 10-year-old. It has something to do with the scale of Sergio Leone's gloriously excessive 1968 Western. Every dusty street is a football field's width. Every grizzled face, shot in screen-filling close-up, looms like a head on Mount Rushmore. Every gunfight is a duel of the gods. A viewer becomes an HO-scale brakeman walking through a regular-sized train yard. In this, the most elaborate and exhilarating of his grandiose pistol operas, Leone took the Western he envisioned as a child — an Old West of quick-triggered warriors, enormous open spaces and superheroic deeds — and transferred it to the screen with its mythic distortions intact. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Aug. 27, 2009)
5:40 p.m.: Gun Crazy
Directed by Joseph Lewis, USA, 1950, NR, 86 min., 35mm
If you define a great American movie as one that provides insight into our national character, one that uses the tools of moviemaking in innovative ways, or one that delights you or offers something new each time you see it, here are two nominees. One is Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing, a drama so rich in conflict, movement, humor, observation, craft and the particulars of its time that it will stand. The other is Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy, a cinematically bold, shockingly frank retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story. Sex, guns and money — what could be more American? —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (June 25, 1998)
8 p.m.: Femme Fatale
Directed by Brian De Palma, USA, 1938, NR, 102 min., 35mm
Brian De Palma’s curse is to know more about movies, and movie history, than the hacks who keep calling him a Hitchcock scavenger. In the case of this exhilarating and deviously multifaceted thriller — a film-studies dissertation hidden in a bottomless box of chocolate-covered sin — accusing him of ripping off Hitchcock is like accusing Todd Haynes of ripping off Douglas Sirk. Not just a daredevil piece of cinematic storytelling, juggling multiple plots, paths and even destinies, this is a master class in how to visually organize a movie. When it comes out on DVD, spend an afternoon tracing its running-water motif — and watch open-mouthed as an uproariously trashy thriller suddenly yields a complex symbolic and spiritual order. I hear there’s nekkid women in it too. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Jan. 9, 2003)
10:05 p.m.: The Brood
Directed by David Cronenberg, Canada, 1979, R, 92 min., 35mm
Canadian splatter-movie auteur David Cronenberg was a lot more interesting when he made movies for drive-ins instead of arthouses, and this visionary horror film ranks among his most disturbing, provocative work. At an isolated clinic, psychotherapist Oliver Reed teaches patients how to manifest mental anguish in treatable boils and lesions on their skin — a practice that may be tied to a string of grisly murders committed by hooded, mallet-wielding dwarves. It’s haunting, it’s terrifying, it’s original, and it illustrates the governing theme of Cronenberg’s work: The mind is constantly at war with the flesh, and flesh is easier to destroy. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Oct. 30, 1997)
Midnight: The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu, 1984, NR, 98 min., 35mm
Though, so far as we know, Jim never wrote about the mid-’80s Hong Kong cult-status action flick Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, in conversations he would sing its praises with the effusive giddiness of a martial-arts-obsessed school boy.
SUNDAY, SEPT. 25
11 a.m.: A Brighter Summer Day
Directed by Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991, NR, 237 min., 4k DCP
A four-hour drama about 1960s Taiwanese street gangs that Ridley once called a “staggering epic.”
3:20 p.m.: Meet Me in St. Louis
Directed by Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1944, NR, 113 min., 35mm
I can’t put it any plainer: This belongs near or at the top of anyone’s list of the great American movies, and the chance to see it on the big screen is a gift in itself. The honey-dipped heartland Americana of Vincente Minnelli’s musical looks as corny today as it must have in 1944 — at first. Even in the ’40s, the movie’s turn-of-the-century “simpler time” was distant, and Arthur Freed’s fabled MGM production unit burnished it to a nostalgic glow for heartsick wartime audiences. But the emotional intensity, fondness and empathy of Minnelli’s direction make the movie anything but sappy: This is a beautiful, bittersweet imagining of a collectively dreamed past. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Dec. 6, 2007)
5:40 p.m.: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Directed by Jacques Demy, France, 1964, NR, 91 min., DCP
If four stars, in the Scene's Movie Guide, denotes a must-see movie, Jacques Demy's 1964 musical deserves five. It's one of my absolute favorite films. Girl (Catherine Deneuve) loves boy (Nino Castelnuovo) in a seaside French town splashed with impossibly gorgeous Technicolor. Girl and boy swear eternal love, until the boy is shipped off to the conflict in Algiers. Then the girl learns she is pregnant. With every line sung to a lilting Michel Legrand score — the main theme, Americanized as "I Will Wait for You," became a pop standard — it strikes some people at first as the silliest thing they've ever seen. But few movies evoke the transience and naïveté of first love as piercingly as its youthful intensity. It culminates in a glorious final image, a gas station dusted by a Christmas Eve snowfall, that may be the saddest happy ending in movie history. Get a stout box of Kleenexes, take someone you love and don't let go of their hand. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (May 6, 2004)
7:30 p.m.: Jules and Jim
Directed by François Truffaut, France, 1962, NR, 105 min., 35mm
François Truffaut's beautiful 1961 film concerns two friends, the German Jules (Oskar Werner) and the Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), in the years surrounding World War I, and the maddeningly willful woman, Catherine (the unforgettable Jeanne Moreau), whom they both love. (Stanley Kauffman once described it as the story of an isosceles triangle that gradually becomes equilateral.) Like the director's later Two English Girls — another film about a doomed love triangle, also adapted from an Henri-Pierre Roché novel — this film about the ultimate impossibility of lasting romantic love is among the most romantic movies ever made. —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (May 5, 2005)
MONDAY, SEPT. 26
Stop Making Sense7:30 p.m.: Stop Making Sense
Directed by Jonathan Demme, USA, 1984, NR, 88 min., DCP
The first concert I ever saw was the Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues Tour at Municipal Auditorium in 1983; it made me a concertgoer for life, but I’m not sure I got as much out of it live as I did reliving it through Jonathan Demme’s peerless performance film, Stop Making Sense. … The director’s love of people and performers radiates from the film, and he caught the band at its joyous peak, from frontman David Byrne’s mesmerizing solo entrance to “Psycho Killer” to his big-suit romp through “Swamp” to a chill-raising “Once in a Lifetime.” And the shared spotlight on Heads Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth (whose side project Tom Tom Club gets a sizable sidebar), as well as auxiliary members Bernie Worrell, Steven Scales, Alex Weir and Lynn Mabry, makes this a kind of anti-Last Waltz — a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
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