July 20, 1971.
A day that will live in the hearts and minds of music fans forever. That, dear friends, is the day that Robert Earl Davis, Jr. was born.
You don’t know him?
Maybe you know him better by his DJ name, DJ Screw. Also known as “The Originator,” he invented the DJ technique, Chopped And Screwed. That, of course, is where the DJ slows down the beat of the record they are playing.
The main influence on this style is the constant ingestion of “purple drank,” soda mixed with cough syrup.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of this style of music because…well, we won’t get into that right now. DJ Screw was not only born not too far from my hometown, but was a huge influence on the hip hop community (addiction to cough syrup or no), so I felt the need to commemorate the day of his birth by picking out the five best Chopped And Screwed movies.
(Watch out for spoilers here. It’s hard to talk about slow motion scenes in movies without talking about the climaxes. Sorry.)
We’ll start with the one that really started it all:
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Written by Sam Peckinpah and Walon Green
Sam Peckinpah didn’t invent slow-motion, but he certainly perfected it.
Not only is The Wild Bunch one of the greatest Westerns ever made, but it is, to this day, one of the most violent. Peckinpah saw fit to make sure that we watched every moment of those gunfights and “ballets of death” by slowing down the action. For this “end of the Old West” story, he wanted us to feel every bullet ripping through the men who were watching their way of life die.
Unfortunately, by doing this he not only killed his characters off one by one, he helped to kill the genre. Not long after The Wild Bunch‘s release, Hollywood decided that it had gone far enough with Westerns and stopped making them on such a grand scale.
(Also, if you want to see the recently late Ernest Borgnine be a badass, watch this movie. Outside of Marty, he was really never better.)
The Matrix (1999)
Written and Directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski
Technically, the filmmaking technique used in The Matrix is not considered slow motion.
It’s actually called “flow motion” or “bullet time.” Whatever. The action is slowed down so that we can see the bullets zip past Neo (Keanu Reeves) in a way that we had never seen before. The Wachowskis weren’t the first to use bullet time (that would actually be a 1985 music video by a band called Accept), but they were the first outside of Gap commercials (directed by Michel Gondry) to be seen by a really big audience, which means that they were the first to really influence others to use the technique.
Where did the initial idea come from?
Well, the opening of the Japanese tv show Speed Racer, of course!
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Directed by: Godfrey Reggio
This semi-documentary is one of the best examples of free-form filmmaking.
Yes, it has a theme of man and our relationship with nature (it’s title is Hopi for “life out of balance”), but Reggio himself said that he just shot whatever he thought would look good on film. Then he took those images and either sped them up or slowed them down in order to show the details with which our lives move forward.
With a thoughtful Philip Glass score, Koyaanisqatsi is an experimental film that, really, anyone can enjoy on some level.
Drive (2011)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by Hossein Amini
Based on book by James Sallis
Maybe this is a bit new to be on the list, but I think it fits if only for one scene.
First off, the movie is great and should be seen whether you’re looking for killer slo-mo or not. The story of a driver, the woman he slowly falls in love with and the murders that happen around them is distanced, yet strangely heartfelt. And the music….oh, the music.
But that’s not why we’re here.
We’re here because, after nearly an hour of slow moving drama, suddenly there are outbursts of gore-filled violence that shocked everyone in the theatre, especially the slow-motion death of a character that we think is going to be major. Unfortunately for her, she was introduced mainly to get her brain splattered all over an anonymous bathroom mirror in an explosion of gore that reminds us of just how fragile our heads are.
The Killer (1989)
Written and Directed by John Woo
The true descendent of Sam Peckinpah is John Woo.
Instead of Westerns, though, he made Hong Kong gangster movies that were so full of blood-lettings and brotherly love that he had to slow down the action to make us feel every inch of despair that these characters felt when their brothers in arms were killed. The Killer is my personal favorite of his films because of that bond that is held by the two main characters (Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee). These guys may be on opposite sides of the law, but they’ve become best friends.
That last shootout in the church (complete with Woo’s favorite animal, the dove) is a rough one down to the final shots, and Chow’s last moments are stretched so that we feel the anguish that Danny has all over his face. If ever there was a heartbreaking action film, this is it.
