The Hip Pocket #32: DOGFIGHT
River Phoenix and Lili Taylor's delicate duet is one of our '90s faves
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.
Dogfight
River Phoenix, Lili Taylor, Richard Panebianco, Anthony Clark, Mitchell Whitfield, Holly Near, Elizabeth Daily, Sue Morales, Christina Mastin, Christopher Shaw, John Lay, Chris San Nicolas, Brian Gotta, Peg Phillips, Neal Allen, Ron Lynch, Dale Garman, Bruce Pearson, Angie Utt, Kenneth Utt, Julian Schembri, Barb Benedetti, Ivars Mikelson, Brendan Fraser, Matt Skerritt, Dion Williams, Jason Moore, Denise Williams, Kristie Gamer, David MacIntyre, Art Cahn, Robert Munns, Jessica Wallenfels, Bonnie Fox, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Joseph Franklin, Frank Walters, Jacob Luft, Constance McCord, Laura Vetter, Krisha Fairchild, George Evans, Jillian Armenante, Anne Elizabeth Washburn, John Fry, Albert Farrar, Rafael Orozoco
cinematography by Bobby Bukowski
music by Mason Daring
screenplay by Bob Comfort
produced by Richard Guay and Peter Newman
directed by Nancy Savoca
Rated R
1 hr 34 mins
A young man on his way to Vietnam falls in love with a young woman after playing a cruel joke on her as part of a night out with his friends.
This may be the textbook definition of a “hip pocket” movie for me. This is one of the movies that led me to rebrand this entire idea and dream up our upcoming podcast. This is a movie that went under the radar when it came out and that continues to be largely unknown, but I would consider it one of the strongest films of 1991, and every single time I’ve returned to it, it feels like I fall in love for the first time all over again.
Every year at Comic-Con, HitFix would throw a giant party on the night before the first day of the event. One of those years, at one of those parties, I spotted Lili Taylor. I don’t remember what film she was there to promote. It might have been the year of The Conjuring or it might have been for Hemlock Grove or one of the Maze Runner movies. Whatever it was, I asked the publicists working the party to introduce me, and we ended up talking for about twenty minutes. The first thing I said to her, almost as soon as we’d been introduced, was “I love Dogfight,” and as soon as I said it, she lit up.
“So do I.” Talking to her about the process of getting that role and the experience she had working with River Phoenix, her deep affection for the film shone through. I get it. I think Taylor’s an amazing actor, and every time I return to this film, I am so impressed by the way she plays Rose, the folk-music-loving heart and soul of this film. It’s a role that could easily end up being cruel, but Taylor refuses to ever let Rose be the butt of the joke. If you haven’t seen the film, it has a very clever structure, and it’s almost a shame to give away anything it does as it does it. It seems crazy to me that it took so long for producers to get Bob Comfort’s script made, especially with the Vietnam mania in Hollywood in the late ‘80s. The film opens with Eddie Birdlace (Phoenix) and his fellow Marines on their way to Vietnam. They stop over in San Francisco for one night before they ship out, and they decide to throw “a party.” When I watched this one recently, my 17-year-old son was here and he watched it with me. He had no idea what the film is about, and the title didn’t really tell him anything. As we started it, he didn’t know where things were going, and I realized the film plays beautifully that way.
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