effanee

I landed a pair of dream jobs in the summer of ’90…Marty’s Records and Club Vid, side by side in the same strip mall, flanked on one end by a Little Caesar’s.  It was a glorious time and TOTALLY instrumental in shaping my tastes in music and film.  And pizza.

One of the kids I worked with at Club Vid was this guy named Andrew.  He was a high school student at the North Carolina School of the Arts and when it came to movies he was way ahead of me in terms of what I deemed “important cinema”.  Andrew was into Kubrick, Tati, Gilliam and Herzog.  I was into Spielberg, loved Bill & Ted and hadn’t ventured too far outside of that box.  So I asked Andrew for a recommendation and he directed me to Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle).

Le Dernier Combat is a film that I normally wouldn’t have given a second look.  It was French and it was filmed in black-and-white.  Released in 1983, it’s director Luc Besson’s first film…he went on to write and direct La Femme Nikita, The Professional and  The Fifth Element, among others.  The story is about a couple of friends surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, humans are few and far between and no one talks.  Literally, no one talks…the film contains no dialog.  And there’s only a couple of minutes of music.  Weird, right?  Yes, it is.  But the story hooked me.  Watching Le Dernier Combat was a defining moment for me, i.e., there are GREAT stories being told outside of Hollywood.

Thanks, Andrew, for helping to open my eyes.