Chances are you or someone you know has been infected with cinephilia. The primary symptom: obsessive knowledge of and passion for the world of film. As Martin Scorsese has said, there's only one cure. More film.
The condition has spread to two of the summer's best films, movies that clearly love movies. In Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, opening Friday, two misfit Pittsburgh teens, Greg (Plano's Thomas Mann) and Earl (RJ Cyler), bond over their interest in often-obscure works of cinema. They pore over the documentary Burden of Dreams, a film about the making of a film, in their history teacher's office. In their spare time, when they're not hanging out with a young cancer patient (Olivia Cooke), they make their own parodies. A Clockwork Orange becomes "A Sockwork Orange,"performed by sock puppets. Mean Streets becomes "Grumpy Cul-de-Sacs." The list goes blissfully on.
"I was so excited by Greg's specific tastes in cinema," Mann said during a recent stop in Dallas to promote the film. "It would be too easy to pay homage to Fight Club or Pulp Fiction, classic teenage boy movies."
The Pulp Fiction homage comes in The Wolfpack, a terrific documentary slated to show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth July 10-12. If cinema makes life bearable for the guys in Earl, it makes life possible for the Wolfpack crew.
The six Angulo brothers were all but forbidden to leave their squalid downtown Manhattan apartment for years. Their mentally ill, domineering father thought the outside world too dangerous. But he did supply them with piles of movies, and boy did they dive in. They transcribed entire screenplays by hand. Then they went a step further, creating elaborate costumes out of cardboard, yoga mats and whatever else they could find and acting out scenes from their favorite movies, including The Dark Knight, Reservoir Dogs and, yes, Pulp Fiction.
As they perform these scenes for the cameras of Wolfpack director Crystal Moselle, we realize movies have thrown the Angulo brothers a lifeline, a world of the imagination that allows them to go elsewhere, at least in their minds.
Me and Earl director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon knows the feeling. He grew up in Laredo without a lot of friends, unsure what the world held for him. But he knew he loved watching and taping movies on HBO and raiding the VHS selection at the local video store. One day his older sister returned from a school trip to New York and told him people were actually getting paid to make these movies.
He was intrigued.
"When you're an introvert in a small town, and you're going through a phase in your life when you don't have a lot of friends, you experience the world through movies," he says. "All you do is watch movies. I'm not saying it was healthy, but it's what I did."
Today, at 42, Gomez-Rejon sprinkles his conversation with references to Michael Powell and Saul Bass and Last Tango in Paris. He worships fellow New York University film graduate Scorsese, the most vocal movie missionary in the business. Gomez-Rejon's passion has paid off: Me and Earl won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
"He makes being a cinephile very, very cool," Cooke says. "I've never loved anything the way he loves movies."
Now he's paying it forward to his young cast members. He sends bundles of Criterion Collection discs to Mann. He sent Cyler a copy of Midnight Cowboy, and the young actor can't stop watching it.
"The movies I watch are usually stuff like Transformers," Cyler says. "When he gave me this movie it opened up a new world to me. Now I'll start paying attention to older movies."
That's the other cool thing about cinephilia. It can be contagious.
