MOST REALISTIC

Okay, another alphabet list thought up last night when having trouble sleeping (“extreme” chocolate ice cream on a “sugar” cone maybe?) of movies that had scenes in them that were the most “realistic” in terms of what I have seen and/or experienced in my own life:

AMERICAN HOT WAX (most realistic depiction, in most scenes, of early rock’n’roll as I remember it)
BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (though somewhat overdone and melodramatic, in a few scenes comes closest to depicting the giant gap that developed between the last generation for whom some form of “jazz” was the popular music and the first for whom rock’n’roll was)
COMMITMENTS, THE (the wedding scene at the beginning comes closest to the way I remember “Irish” weddings with little kids running around and old gents and drunken aunts and all; and the scenes in which “rabbit” keeps answering imaginary interview questions about his imagined future success in the shower and bathtub reminded me of my own Nobel and Oscar acceptance speeches and post-award interviews in the tubs and showers of my youth)
DON’T LOOK NOW (most realistic love making scene, when it’s really good)
ERASERHEAD (even though the movie was more surreal than real, some scenes evoked the Jersey industrial landscapes of my youth better than any attempts at realism)
FIELD, THE (Richard Harris’s performance as the Irish peasant “hard man,” as they used to say, comes closest to an aspect of some of my own Irish elders I knew as a boy)
GOOD WILL HUNTING (as hokey as some of this film was, and the terrible miscasting of Robin Williams, who did his best but no cigar, the gang of working-class guys Matt Damon’s character is a part of seemed to me pretty accurate to my memories of being part of a gang like that, and it’s definitely the best work Ben Affleck ever did)
HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, A (most realistic lovemaking scene, when the passion stems from the conflict between attraction and anger)
I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND (though I wasn’t a teenager trying to get to the Beatles in their NYC hotel room at the time of their first U. S. appearance on Ed Sullivan, I was only a few years older, working as a musician and feeling the impact of the fanaticism of these mostly young girls, and worked at a mental institution where one was confined after her freak out at their Shea Stadium appearance a few years later—for the most part, this underrated comedy nails a lot of their behavior and style and energy, etc.)
JACOB’S LADDER (despite it’s faults, captured for me much of what “the 60’s”—1966-74—sometimes felt like, especially on drugs)
KING OF NEW YORK (most realistic death scene, when the detective dies on the subway car)
LAST TANGO IN PARIS (comes closest to the reality of sexual excitement fueled by the mystery of partners not yet known and the let down on discovering, or in this case, with Brando’s character, revealing their actual ordinariness)
MENACE II SOCIETY (the party scene in this flick comes closest to what I remember in my teens and early manhood encountering at many parties in black neighborhoods in Jersey and for that matter all over the country)
NAKED (thanks to Ray DiPalma for reminding me of this flick in a recent email—one of my favorites, directed by Mike Leigh whose famously unique methods have created some incredibly realistic films, and in this one David Thewlis gives a completely compelling performance as that kind of manipulatively charismatic abusive personality we’ve probably all encountered, and maybe sometimes been)
ON THE WATERFRONT (the gang kid who succeeded Brando’s “Terry Malloy” as leader of the Golden Warriors came as close as anyone in films to what a kid like that was really like and looked like back then, because it was a real Hoboken kid, not an actor—there was a similar familiarity with some of the older guys too, like “Two Ton Tony” who came from my area)
PERFORMANCE (most realistic rendering, especially in the love making scene, of my 1970s experiences with the effects of drugs and experiments in androgyny)
QUIET MAN, THE (I know many find this John Ford movie clichéd, in terms of Hollywood stereotypes of the “Oirish,” but I find an element of truth in every character in it, no matter how minor, in terms of my own experience with the Irish of my youth)
RESURRECTION (most realistic married-couple-talking-in-bed scene)
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (the 78 record store scene, exactly like the one in our town my big sisters would drag me along with them and into the booths for sampling new recordings etc.; pretty accurate depiction of trains in the 1940s as well)
2 DAYS IN PARIS (most realistic depiction of the kinds of confusion and craziness I encountered in many relationships)
U?
V?
WEEDS (Nick Nolte’s mixture of gratitude, sensual ecstasy and an almost spiritually transcendent sense of being alive, when he makes love for the first time after being released from prison, matches my memory of that experience on being released from much shorter periods of confinement or other circumstances preventing me from making love for a time)
X?
Y?
Z ?

I know this is all very personal, “reality”—”truth”—“the way it was”—is different for everyone, usually, so I hope you add your own take on what seemed most real to you in terms of your own experience and the films you’ve seen.