10am - His Girl Friday (1940, dir. Howard Hawks)
We'll kick things off with what might be the greatest (certainly the fastest) screwball comedy of all time, in which Cary Grant attempts to win back ex-wife Rosalind Russell over the course of a day while both use the Power of the Press to stop a convicted man from being unfairly executed. This was one of the movies that first made me fall in love with classic comedies and it's never lost its power no matter how many times I see it. It's always still just as fast-paced and funny as it always was, only now I get to pick out a new favorite line or delivery each time I see it. When Erika threw me a real-deal 24-hour movie festival for my 40th birthday, I made the mistake of programming this one in the morning when I was already too tired to keep up with it. Better to let it start us out.
11:45am - Quick Change (1990, dir. Bill Murray & Howard Franklin)
One of the great unsung comedies of the early '90s, this poison love letter to New York stars Bill Murray, Geena Davis, and Randy Quaid as a group of bank robbers who can't seem to get out of the city no matter how hard they try. Like Martin Scorsese's After Hours (the best One Crazy Night movie), this one has our characters encountering a bunch of colorful characters, most memorably Tony Shaloub's cab driver. Quick Change is such a masterpiece of deadpan absurdity that I know it's going to keep the energy and laughs of His Girl Friday rolling along.
1:30pm - Training Day (2001, dir. Antoine Fuqua
Antoine Fuqua's best movie follows a day in the life of corrupt cop Denzel Washington (who won the Oscar for his work here) and new trainee Ethan Hawke as they do all kinds of potentially shady shit together. This is screenwriter David Ayer mining familiar territory about Los Angeles and bad cops but it's sold more effectively than usual thanks to good location photography, Fuqua's direction, and especially Washington and Hawke (who was also nominated for an Oscar) at the center. For whatever reason I'm still rocking my standard def snapcase DVD for this one; I should probably upgrade to the 4K at some point.
3:30pm - Clerks (1994, dir. Kevin Smith)
In the interest of lightening things up after Training Day, let's watch Kevin Smith's first (and still best?) movie, following the day in the life and work of a put-upon convenience store worker and his best friend. Smith tries his hardest to be edgy and there's obviously some button-pushing stuff that hasn't aged great -- this is a 30-year old movie, after all -- but at its center is an ultimately sweet movie about male friendship. It's also helped by the fact that this is the movie in which Smith leans hardest into his lack of visual sense, meaning the form actually suits the material. The kid in me who first fell in love with Smith and his work via this movie will never not love it.
5:30pm - Barbershop (2002, dir. Tim Story)
One of the great hangout movies of the early 2000s, Tim Story's original Barbershop puts together a fantastic ensemble cast for a day in the life and business of a Chicago barbershop as its owner (Ice Cube) debates selling it. There's a really fun group of characters and a real hangout vibe that makes this one easy to revisit, as evidenced by the multiple sequels that return to the barbershop without ever working as well as the original. I actually think Barbershop will be a good lead-in for our next movie.
7:30pm - Do the Right Thing (1989, dir. Spike Lee)
The true Best Picture of 1989 is maybe the greatest 24-hour movie of all time. Sure, it gets pretty heavy for a Primetime Pizza slot but just because there is tragedy at the end of the film shouldn't discount how entertaining it is. That's a big part of what makes Do the Right Thing such a masterpiece: it's more alive than almost any other movie. That there's any debate as to whether or not this is Spike Lee's greatest movie -- it's between this and Malcolm X -- is proof that he's one of the all-time greats.
9:30pm - Crank (2006, dir. Mark Neveldine/Brian Taylor)
We're not going to do a traditional overnight full of weird stuff and Italian horror, but that doesn't mean we can't program some mindless trash as we head into that section of our marathon. That brings us to Crank, the Neveldine/Taylor joint that would probably be my favorite Jason Statham action movie if not for Crank 2 and Wrath of Man. He plays a hit man who's been poisoned and has to keep his heart rate up so he doesn't die; somehow the movie is four times stupider than it sounds, but in a sublime and often offensive way. That there aren't more movies like Crank is both a shame and proof that there absolutely should not be more movies like Crank.
11pm - Take Me Home Tonight (2011, dir. Michael Dowse)
A good excuse to program a Brian Saur favorite. Really just Can't Hardly Wait for a slightly older set, the movie focuses on a college graduate (Topher Grace) who gets invited to what is a party doubling as a high school reunion in the 1988, I'm assuming so there can be a bunch of '80s music on the soundtrack and jokes about the fashion. This is almost one of those CastMaker movies, with early roles for Theresa Palmer, Chris Pratt, Demetri Martin, and Seth Gabel, plus more recognizable faces like Grace, Anna Faris, Michelle Trachtenberg (RIP), Dan Fogler, and Lucy Punch. The movie didn't make enough of a dent to launch anyone to stardom, but it's the perfect sort of breezy comedy that will go down easy as exhaustion sets in.
12:45am - Night of the Living Dead (1990, dir. Tom Savini)
We should still watch some horror during our overnight, and while I could probably program George A. Romero's original zombie classic into this spot I'd kind of like to rewatch Tom Savini's 1990 remake, which I checked out back in October when Sony released the uncut 4K (it's not very different) and liked way more than I remembered. Tony Todd (RIP) is a particular standout as he so often was. The added gore doesn't amount to much, but there's a cool fade from black and white into color at the opening that has been restored and I'm happy to have a version closer to what Savini intended.
2:30am - Judgment Night (1993, dir. Stephen Hopkins)
During the overnight section of our marathon, we should watch a movie about one of the worst overnights imaginable: being hunted down by Denis Leary in the scariest parts of Chicago and being friends with Jeremy Piven. This movie, once famous only for its soundtrack, has been rediscovered by the right kinds of audiences over the last 10 years and gained appreciated for what a effective thriller it is. It would probably be Stephen Hopkins' best movie if not for Predator 2. Hopkins bump!
4:30am - The Warriors (1979, dir. Walter Hill)
One of the best One Night Only movies ever made, Walter Hill's dystopian street gang epic focuses on The Warriors, a gang framed for murder who have to get back to their turf in NYC as every other gang in the city hunts them down. It's literally one of the best premises for a movie ever, probably because it's based on a classical Greek text. The scene with Michael Beck and Deborah Van Valkenburgh on the train is one of my absolute favorites.
6am - Wet Hot American Summer (2001, dir. David Wain)
This one doesn't need to take place over the span of a single day -- there's enough here to fill an entire summer -- but one of the jokes is that it does. Made mostly with members of the MTV sketch comedy group The State but adding heavy hitters like Janeane Garofalo, Amy Poehler, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, and Paul Rudd (this was the movie that taught us all how funny he is), Wet Hot is, joke for joke, performance for performance, still the funniest comedy of the 2000s. We'll be laughing even harder than usual because we should, by now, be delirious.
7:30am - The Paper (1994, dir. Ron Howard)
Ron Howard's most underrated movie, The Paper focus on a manic 24 hours in the life of an editor at the New York Sun (Michael Keaton) and the various people with whom he works (Glenn Close, Robert Duvall) and lives (Marisa Tomei). The 24-hour ticking clock isn't just a gimmick here but actually part of the plot, which involves Keaton desperately trying not just to get a story, but to get it right for the morning edition. While not one of the great journalism movies, Ron Howard does manage to conjure up a kind of electric energy and maintain it for the length of the film. It will be like starting our morning by chugging three Monster energy drinks, which doesn't sound half bad.
9:30am - Dazed and Confused (1993, dir. Richard Linklater)
Showing this to one of my film classes recently is what inspired this list. Richard Linklater's ode to growing up in the late 1970s might possibly be the greatest hangout movie of all time. I resisted it for years because I thought it was little more than a stoner comedy, and while there is a lot of weed smoking in the film (a fact of which I became acutely aware while showing it to a class), that's more a period detail than a source of humor in the movie. The cast of future stars and familiar faces is insane, the soundtrack is wall-to-wall bangers (at least in the context of the movie; I wouldn't listen to a lot of these songs on their own), the details perfectly observed. The ending of this movie captures exactly the feeling I want to evoke at the end of our 24-hour marathon. Let's go get Aerosmith tickets.
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