Yeah you heard me. This was a rough year with a great winner and another great nominee but the rest were oh so painful. Thankfully, I watched them before January 1st which means that they still fall into the "2010 sucked" category and doesn't screw up the "2011 promises to be way better" category. Because after all, the first half of 2010 was pretty great with my graduation, the finales of Lost and 24, and Scarlett Johansson beating up bad guys while sporting black leather. The rest of 2010 felt like one long William Hurt movie. So I hope 2011 will be better, it has 4 summer superhero films so it's looking pretty good. I hope 2010 proves to be the 1973 of the new millennium. A year that occurred between two great years (Oscar-wise anyway, otherwise my metaphor fails miserably).
We'll have some nice bookends in this entry because only the winner is good, along with this first movie: American Graffiti. It's probably the only coming-of-age tale that I like. Because unlike other movies of its type, it's not an angsty disaster. This is what most of them do: start off cheery and funny, turn sour, end on a slightly upbeat note. That's annoying. It's annoying because most people who recognize with the story get caught up in the angst and then dislike the characters for having the upbeat ending that rarely occurs in real life. This movie is funny and charming almost all the way through, only letting up in the final seconds that tell us the fates of the various characters. The scene functions almost as an afterthought and thus succeeds at being a powerful and sobering statement about the fading of youthful splendor. But it does it at the very end where it belongs and it doesn't linger. The film uses period music splendidly and appropriately (I'm looking at you: The Big Chill). The soundtrack doesn't feel like a mixtape or a Time Life CD collection. I mean...it does in the sense that all of the songs play organically on the radio or in a diner or something, and they're all what would have been playing at the time. BUT using a song like "The Great Pretender" (which is one of my favorites) is a much better choice for a certain type of scene than say, "My Baby Does the Hanky Panky" (which is a good song choice for exactly zero scenes). It also reflects the nature of teenage society back then. If you wanted to recreate it today, you'd have to have Call of Duty and Facebook in the background of every scene and that would just be clunky. So even the social commentary was more charming back then. The whole movie plays as charming actually. It's funny and it's touching and it's fun but it also has the harsh reality of life lurking in the background. And as I said, the background is where it belongs because that is where it is most effective/powerful and least annoying/whiny. It's of course not up to par with Lucas' later work (what is?) but it is a step up from his first film: THX-1138 which is mostly only remembered during Dolby tests.
This next movie I expected to dislike, and I did: Cries and Whispers. What you may not know is that when I expect to dislike a movie I often end up enjoying it all the more. I think I've mentioned this as pertaining to some of my mom's favorite movies that I ended up liking, but who remembers what I've said and what I haven't? I certainly don't. Anyway, I'm really not an Ingmar Bergman fan. Granted, I've only ever seen this and The Seventh Seal but since the latter is considered his best work I don't think I'll ever like any of his stuff. Kind of like how you probably won't like anything Tarantino if you don't like Pulp Fiction. The difference being that Tarantino is a genius and Bergman is a poster boy for movie snobs. "Ohhh, the movie is in Swedish! If I like it then that means my taste is better than yours!" I truly hope that the 3-hour epic of his from 1972 at least resembles something watchable when I'm forced to sit through it soon. Bergman's problem is that he has good ideas but they only ever take up a small portion of his movies. The photography is undeniably stunning in this movie, to the point that I would've been content to just look at the images without sound or subtitles. I'd have gotten just as much out of it probably. The story revolves around three sisters, one of whom is dying of cancer. And as she's dying all of the bad blood comes out about various goings-on in the past. Wow, a movie about someone who's dying and all of their family members are still troubled about unimportant crap that happened when they were kids is the focal point. Either every deathbed situation in human history is a ripoff of this movie, or it's the other way around. Which is fine, because that makes it a compelling story. Too bad only about 1/3 of the movie actually directly involves that. What was the rest of it about? I truly don't know. I didn't care. I was not paying enough attention to recall anything directly afterward, let alone several weeks later. Just like The Seventh Seal: the premise of a knight playing chess with Death and discussing religious/philosophical issues is fantastic. Too bad it amounts to literally about 16 minutes of movie. So I remain convinced that Bergman is the go-to guy for international relations when the Academy feels like saying "hey, let's pretend like we're not the self-centered American douches that we are by throwing a token nomination to a guy you have to be Swedish to like." I'm being facetious but I truly think you have to be part of a society to appreciate its art sometimes. That's why way back in the day when I talked about A Serious Man I mentioned that you might have to be a pessimistic Italian/Jew/other Mediterranean descendant to enjoy it.
Whereas you have to be a frightenable person to enjoy The Exorcist. Or really to appreciate its existence at all. Because there's no particular point to the film that I can figure out. I detest horror films in case I haven't mentioned that, because they usually only exist to scare people with cheap gags. There was a recent "horror" film that is truly outstanding and that I will hopefully get a chance to talk about fairly soon (and I will if it gets nominated, as it should). But other than that the only horror films that are any good are: A) spoofs B) a horror story within the world of another genre or C) so bad that they should be spoofs but aren't. There are even horror movies with interesting undertones of social commentary. I don't like those either but at least they're trying, sort of. This movie only seems to be interested in being shocking. If there was a deeper meaning, I missed it completely. On top of that, it's not even particularly good as a horror film if you ask me. Part of that is that it's dated by now of course. But I would have never had the possessed girl lip sync to a different "demon voice" because that just feels fake. They should have either had her mouth closed with the voice coming out (pretty creepy) or her mouth should have just stayed open with the sounds coming out (creepier still). Neither of those would have taken you out of the experience by reminding you that a lot of dubbing was used. And the name of the demon in the film is Pazuzu. Pazuzu. Say that aloud for a second. Sound menacing? No. Sound scary? No. Sound like a Fraggle Rock reject? Probably. Of all the Beelzebubs and Asmodeuses (Asmodeii?) they picked that particular demon name? It is a legit obscure dark god from back in the day South America apparently, and how his pendant ended up in the Middle East in the ruins of a completely different religion's structure is anyone's guess. And the theme music? Perhaps I've heard it spoofed too often, but it's only used in a handful of ansillary scenes in the film and never in the actual exorcising scenes. Plus, its tone and the pace at which it is played sounds like it's on an organ grinder being played by an especially spastic monkey. So to sum up my thoughts on the movie, as Cleveland Brown might succinctly say: "I did not care for it."
On the complete opposite end of what makes a movie bad is A Touch of Class. The title is meant to be ironic because neither character has anything resembling class. Get it? It's funny! Except you can't have an ironic title with a movie that has about as much irony as an after-dinner mint. It's as cliché as they come, except it's not even done well. Much like the movie I just finished ranting about. It's a romantic comedy with a woman who has a sharp British appearance complete with a sharp British accent and sharp British bangs. I don't find that particularly attractive, but that's just me. Other British ladies yes, in case you were wondering. And the dude is George Segal, a mostly-out-of-shape, ordinary-faced tool of a man. Not in real life necessarily (the tool part, he's probably nice enough in reality). If I was interested in two ordinary looking people going on dates while engaging in uninteresting conversation and bickering, I wouldn't bother with the second half of "dinner and a movie." People want funny! And this movie isn't funny, but it's not particularly serious either. Thus it manages to build as much of an interesting story as you'd expect from a Rom-Com (none) while also retaining the humorless atmosphere of a Lifetime movie. I will say that the dialogue was at least fairly realistic, unlike The Goodbye Girl where the actors were pausing for the laugh track that wasn't there. Still, they seemed to mix and match the exact wrong things. If you have two unlikable lead characters then that's fine, if you have a dark sense of humor (which it doesn't). If you have a happy-go-lucky rom-com structure then you should have a cliché happy ending to fit the rest of your movie (it doesn't). I wouldn't be surprised if two entirely different scripts got mixed up on the floor of some studio and when the chocolate got in the peanut butter and vice versa, the result was neither delicious nor marketable. I'm starting to sound like Roger Ebert with my obscure metaphors that sort of make sense. To make a long rant just slightly longer: George Segal has aged well. Looks almost the same now as he did then. Good for him. Maybe he'll be in something good sometime.
This year's winner, and by far its best offering, is The Sting. I saw this when I was like 10 so I decided to watch it again. It's a pretty great movie to be certain. It's obviously not on the same level as the '74 and '72 winners but then again, neither is anything else. What makes this film really work is that it's made in the style of a film that would have been around in the time period it depicts. The pacing is similar and the colors are a little too vibrant in just the way they were back in those days when color in film was new. In addition, the film is separated into "parts" each with their own title card and old timey music (old timey source music plays through the whole thing). Since I've referenced myself several times today, why not a little more? This is sort of what Scorsese did in The Aviator and it's exactly what Coppola failed to do in The Godfather Part III. To me, you don't have to go all out with your stories set in the past but don't make a 1930s movie look like a 1970s movie. And they don't, much to their credit. I'm sure younger audiences of the day were just as thrown as young audiences today are when a film is done in a slightly old fashioned way. On top of all of that, I love stories about con men. Because if I ever get bored enough during my current state of unemployment to turn into a criminal (it could happen) I would probably be a con man. I respect any profession that requires you to be smarter and slicker than your fellow man, even if you're robbing your fellow man blind. I would also consider being a pool hustler but I'm not sure that's a thing anymore. Robert Redford and Paul Newman ooze their usual debonair coolness in this movie, and the plot is just twisted and complex enough to be believable and not so much that you have to watch it 3 times just to figure out what happened at all. The basic plot is that a con man and a washed up con man team up to get revenge on a crime boss who killed a friend of theirs. They could have just written a straight revenge story but the revenge of a con man is far more interesting and far more entertaining. So while it might not be the artistic/philosophical tour-de-force that many Kubrick films are (none of which I've gotten to write about yet) it is nonetheless a very well done film that everyone should watch at some point. It's on Netflix Instant so there's no excuse not to!
Well I guess 1973 redeemed itself in some ways, and even if I didn't like everything in the year there were some iconic and famous movies which is more than I can say for most of the 80s. But you must prepare yourself for the awesomeness of 1972. Little known fact: 72 is my lucky number. Because it's my grandfather's lucky number backwards, it's the tetragrammaton number (not that anyone knows what that is, but it is of religious significance and more importantly: Assassin's Creed significance), and it is also the year of the greatest movie of all time. Not to oversell it or anything. And some other stuff came out that year too I guess, something about some southern hicks, some German dancers, and some Swedish settlers. You won't care by comparison, but I suppose we'll discuss them anyway.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
1974: The Year that Had an Outcome Even More Predictable than Most Seagal Movies
I mean, come on. If I was another movie this year, I'd have delayed my release date so I would have had an actual shot at winning something. Although only one of these movies would have had a real shot in any other year anyway, so I guess it's all good. Not to say that the nominees are all good, because they're not. But there's only one actually bad movie, which I'm still watching because it's really freaking long and I need something to distract myself. As I'm all out of Cheez-Its, I figured I'd blog it up.
To get things rolling, the our first movie is the one that might have had a shot in a different year: Chinatown. And what a fantastic film it is. I saw it a long time ago on TV and remembered that I liked it, but I'm glad I re-watched it because there's no way I could have truly appreciated it back then. For me: it's the last of the great film noirs. Although it's technically a "neo-noir," don't ask me what the distinction is, it still focuses on the basic noir structure: "private eye gets mixed up in a scheme that's too big for him, everybody ends up crappy in the end, and there's sad trumpet music." In some ways, this was the Jack Nicholson role that created his caricature. Which is funny because he does a really outstanding job, including some scenes of rage that don't come off campy (as they might if he did them today). The actual plot of the film is mostly irrelevant because it's all about the style and the manner in which Jake (the character's name, not a typo) starts unraveling the mystery. At its most basic: the story is about a conspiracy surrounding L.A.'s water supply. It was meant to showcase a very sketchy period of early Los Angeles and was intended to be the first in a trilogy. The other two were supposed to deal with land and highways I believe. The second one was made, but I hear it sucked horribly so there wasn't a third. And I mean, without Roman Polanski what was the point? Because he had fled the country by the time the second one was coming out. This film is actually the last one he filmed in the United States before fleeing and with one notable exception (see 2002) he might as well have called it quits on directing anyway. Because this was the high point. What makes it more interesting than the usual noir is that it takes place in the past. It's showing you a U.S. that doesn't exist anymore. You're watching Jake go about his business, in the only business he's suited for, while keeping in mind that his profession would not be long for this world. The villains of the world were getting too powerful and a private eye with a gun and an attitude wasn't going to cut it anymore. So when he fails at the end of the movie, it's not because of some fatal character flaw or a momentary lapse in judgment. He never had a shot at winning. He never even had a chance with the girl, played by Faye Dunaway. Side note: Faye replaced Jane Fonda, who was the original choice. This is merciful as I detest Jane Fonda and her self-righteous vocal tones would have ruined the whole movie. By the time filming was completed she would have Princed the Tides of the movie to the point where Jacko was a supporting actor. Obscure reference to previous blog post! Anyway, Faye Dunaway really got into the role as she reportedly instructed Jack to actually slap her during the famous scene (which I won't spoil). And even though her part in the movie is relatively minor at times, she really comes across as the type of damaged woman that would attract a guy like Jake. I could go on, but it's really a movie everyone should watch. I'll just add that Jerry Goldsmith's sad trumpet music is truly fantastic and Roman Polanski may be a statutory rapist but he's also a really talented director. And in Hollywood, I'd say that's not too bad.
Sorry for that last bit of hypobole (a word I've invented, meaning the under-exaggeration of something for comedic effect) but I wasn't going to get a chance to use it for The Conversation. Which is unfortunate, because it's a movie that's all about playing things down. Dialing up the tension by making it more subtle. In many ways, it's a little bit like the first film I discussed in that it's about a private investigator who gets in over his head. Okay, that's basically the same overall plot. BUT it's done completely differently. It's a Coppola film (who officially had 2/5 of the year's nominees, impressive) but it doesn't completely play like one. This could be because he wrote it in 1966, prior to his Academy Award winning screenplays/movies. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a great movie, but I thought it was quite well done. Gene Hackman plays the anti Gene Hackman in this movie: a fascinating voyeur called Harry Caul. Okay, he's not really a voyeur since he doesn't look at people from afar for twisted pleasure. It's his job. He listens in on people's conversations from afar for the purposes of exposing possible affairs, general misconduct, etc. His theory is that people feel safe to talk in public and so that's the best place to eavesdrop. Plus, it's not technically illegal to listen to someone's public conversation. Not sure if it's still legal with all of the equipment and whatnot, but I doubt Harry cares. What makes him so fascinating is that he has trouble connecting with real people. He spends so much time watching them from afar that he can't see them as anything but points of interest. Self-serving motives and conspiracies walking around in human form. One particular conversation gives him cause for alarm because he believes that a murder is being plotted (by none other than young and kinda spindly Harrison Ford, who sort of looked like me once). There are, of course, many moral dilemmas surrounding how he should handle this situation. Because if he reveals how he knows, that could destroy his business and even get him into serious trouble. But he also doesn't want to get someone killed. But were they being serious when they said that or just vocalizing some frustrations? These all run through Harry's mind, and reminded me a little bit too much of myself. The manner in which he listened and re-listened and re-re-listened to the same patch of audio was comparable to the constant over-analyzation that happens in my head on a daily basis. And by the time it's the end of the movie, he's gotten so paranoid that he's torn his apartment asunder. All that remained was him and his saxophone. I'd rather not end up like that. Mostly because I can't play the saxophone. I kind of ruined the ending, but I doubt many people will go watch this movie. It's appropriately slow-moving but that wouldn't work for a lot of people. I'm glad that I was in just the right mood to watch it when I did because I highly enjoyed it. I believe my dad referred to it as "an interesting little movie" and I couldn't put it better myself.
Another interesting little movie is Lenny. In fact, I found it far more interesting and entertaining than Lenny Bruce's actual standup routines. I listened to several of them for an American Humor class and I found them to be vulgar just to be vulgar. Something that exists just to exist or just to make people mad is never funny to me. BUT when you watch it from the point of view of someone who was around at the time, it becomes a lot more heroic. Not funnier, just heroic. Although the line about how "it's a good thing we didn't kill Jesus nowadays because then little schoolkids would be wearing electric chairs around their necks" was pretty brilliant and made me laugh out loud. In fact, a lot of the best parts of dialogue weren't necessarily funny but they were interesting. And I agreed with most of it, which is always pleasant. It's weird to watch this and something like Network and think to myself, "I said something just like that the other day! Except without the F-bombs!" And it's all every bit as relevant today as it was then. Because even though we don't have comedians being dragged off by the police anymore, at least not for the content of their standup, we do have the same odd cultural norms. You can show fairly extreme violence on network TV, even more extreme if it's a cartoon, but say the F-word that every kid hears in school anyway? Forget it. I can write about any number of terrible things from a movie, but if I say bad words then I'd have a stigma attached. Let me rephrase: if enough people read my blog to allow for the possibility of a stigma, I'd have a stigma attached. And that's a bit silly. I knew that Lenny was a pioneer in this way, but I only knew it abstractly. Seeing it portrayed was entirely different, and now he's kind of my hero. Dustin Hoffman gets on my nerves at times but in this movie he's excellent. What I don't understand is why Valerie Perrine won for supporting actress that year (she plays his stripper wife, or if you find that offensive: his exotic dancer wife). She's pretty much in the movie for about 12 minutes and 3 of those are just her taking off her clothes. So either the voters that year were adolescent boys or they were middle-aged men who couldn't afford Playboy subscriptions. Yep, that's the one. Though the film is almost 2 hours long, it doesn't feel that long. The pacing that director Bob Fosse uses is just perfect. There's just enough standup material and behind-the-scenes drama. He balanced it out so well and I give him credit for that. Because of that and because the writing was good and I liked the black and white cinematography, this is the rare acting-driven film where I endorse its nomination for Best Picture. I doubt there will be many more of those. So take a good look Michael, because it's the last time. I am just rolling with the obscure references today.
And I'll probably need a lot of them to make this movie interesting: The Towering Inferno. This is quite seriously junk. Its only redeeming quality is its John Williams score and this was early in his career so we'll forgive him. I'm not sure how great actors like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway got mixed up in this nonsense. I was completely not surprised to learn that this was originally two movies that were so similar that they decided to just make it one movie. And they gave it a double-feature length of 2 hours and 44 minutes. That might be okay if the two movies being combined were based on books that were different. Then you've got multiple plots to fill up the running time. But this is based on two disaster books and they come together to form almost 3 hours of "there's a fire in the tallest building on Earth and we need to get everyone out safely." Oh. My. God. That's the basic premise of Rescue Me and even they have never done an entire episode of just rescuing people from a fire. So if they can't fill up 44 minutes with it, how did these people fill up that amount of time plus another 2 hours? Answer: they did not. Well, they did but it's not good. And the screenwriter's name is Sterling Silliphant which can't actually be a real name. That has to be a slight alteration of "hurling siccophant" which is probably what he felt like when he wrote it. This is a studio film if ever there was one. A mish-mash of popular actors in a movie with a lot of effects and very little plot. It was the Avatar of its day. You were waiting for me to say that, right? Well at least the one with the blue people has some awesome fighting at the end. All this has is fire-fighting. I have nothing but respect for the brave men and women who dedicate their lives to saving people from deadly fires. I also have nothing but respect for brave men and women who dedicate their lives to saving people from congenital heart defects, but I wouldn't want to watch 3 hours of that either. I really don't know what else to say, except that I guess it's interesting (comforting? disturbing? anthropologically fascinating?) to note that disaster movies wowed the mindless masses back then just as they do today.
A movie that couldn't be any more the opposite in terms of both the audience it attracts and the quality it possesses is this year's winner and a true masterpiece: The Godfather Part II. Holy freaking crap. There are great movies and then there are movies like this. I don't know how Coppola continued being motivated to make movies, because this was part 2 of not only his career high point but also filmmaking in general. Along with its predecessor, it makes up the only instance in history where a film and its sequel won Best Picture. That will probably never happen again. And I kind of hope it doesn't. For the record, I am more a fan of the first film. Not that I think the difference in quality is too vast, I just prefer the "nice guy turning bad" story to the "bad guy turning worse" story. Although this film actually gives you both, since it is a prequel and a sequel tied up in one. If they tried to do that today it'd be a regular length movie and it would kind of suck. But they gave it the full 200 minutes that it deserves, and I have not once noticed the time going by in the 5 or 6 times that I've seen it. I'll avoid mentioning too many plot details, since if you haven't watched it then you should immediately do so and stop being a human being with no taste. I do feel kind of bad for Al Pacino, because he does an incredible job in this movie but he once again has the show stolen by the actor playing his father. This time it was DeNiro and not Brando. I believe this is the only time that two actors have won an Oscar for playing the same character but I could be wrong. Anyway, the best aspects of these films are the little moments. The fact that the first movie ended on Kay being shut out of Michael's life with the famous door closing on her and in this movie he shuts the door on her himself. Brilliant. Because in a single scene it encapsulates the entire journey of their relationship. The music is wonderful and subtle. The violence is especially well done, because it isn't too gory. It's not tame either. This makes it quite realistic and kind of disturbing. It makes you realize the seriousness of the violence as though it's actually happening, and not as though you're watching a baggie full of food coloring exploding. The film somehow finds a way to forward the plot while delving deeper into the characters. The dialogue is filled with double-speak and straight-up lies. It was so daring to put forth a movie so potentially confusing and expecting audiences to get it. And the film's ultimate betrayal is realized so simply, in such a little moment. That's perfect, because people who lie for a living aren't going to majorly screw up and let loose the important secrets. No character's motivation feels unreasonable. There are no true villains or heroes because everyone has an agenda and pursues it in a very human, very flawed manner. I could go on and on about it, but it'd be insulting to suggest that I could sum up its brilliance in a single paragraph. I once wrote a 12 page paper that compared this film series with The Sopranos TV series and I pretty much only talked about 2 or 3 scenes. Anyway, it's the rare movie that lives up to the hype. My Creative Writing teacher once said that it, along with the first movie, were her favorite films because they're "like artwork that moves" and I'd say that's pretty perfect.
Notice how all of my mentors sum things up succinctly? That's a trick I've never quite learned. As my college professor said Jonathan Swift said, "sorry for the length of this letter, I didn't have time to write a short one." Love that. Thankfully, Coppola didn't know that quote because shorter wouldn't have worked. So this was one of the best years, because it had one of the best movies. But I was surprised by the quality of the other nominees as well. That's why it took me about a week to run through them instead of close to a month. I can't say the next year will be the same, only that it will include growing up in the 60s, growing up on the street, and growing up as a demon.
To get things rolling, the our first movie is the one that might have had a shot in a different year: Chinatown. And what a fantastic film it is. I saw it a long time ago on TV and remembered that I liked it, but I'm glad I re-watched it because there's no way I could have truly appreciated it back then. For me: it's the last of the great film noirs. Although it's technically a "neo-noir," don't ask me what the distinction is, it still focuses on the basic noir structure: "private eye gets mixed up in a scheme that's too big for him, everybody ends up crappy in the end, and there's sad trumpet music." In some ways, this was the Jack Nicholson role that created his caricature. Which is funny because he does a really outstanding job, including some scenes of rage that don't come off campy (as they might if he did them today). The actual plot of the film is mostly irrelevant because it's all about the style and the manner in which Jake (the character's name, not a typo) starts unraveling the mystery. At its most basic: the story is about a conspiracy surrounding L.A.'s water supply. It was meant to showcase a very sketchy period of early Los Angeles and was intended to be the first in a trilogy. The other two were supposed to deal with land and highways I believe. The second one was made, but I hear it sucked horribly so there wasn't a third. And I mean, without Roman Polanski what was the point? Because he had fled the country by the time the second one was coming out. This film is actually the last one he filmed in the United States before fleeing and with one notable exception (see 2002) he might as well have called it quits on directing anyway. Because this was the high point. What makes it more interesting than the usual noir is that it takes place in the past. It's showing you a U.S. that doesn't exist anymore. You're watching Jake go about his business, in the only business he's suited for, while keeping in mind that his profession would not be long for this world. The villains of the world were getting too powerful and a private eye with a gun and an attitude wasn't going to cut it anymore. So when he fails at the end of the movie, it's not because of some fatal character flaw or a momentary lapse in judgment. He never had a shot at winning. He never even had a chance with the girl, played by Faye Dunaway. Side note: Faye replaced Jane Fonda, who was the original choice. This is merciful as I detest Jane Fonda and her self-righteous vocal tones would have ruined the whole movie. By the time filming was completed she would have Princed the Tides of the movie to the point where Jacko was a supporting actor. Obscure reference to previous blog post! Anyway, Faye Dunaway really got into the role as she reportedly instructed Jack to actually slap her during the famous scene (which I won't spoil). And even though her part in the movie is relatively minor at times, she really comes across as the type of damaged woman that would attract a guy like Jake. I could go on, but it's really a movie everyone should watch. I'll just add that Jerry Goldsmith's sad trumpet music is truly fantastic and Roman Polanski may be a statutory rapist but he's also a really talented director. And in Hollywood, I'd say that's not too bad.
Sorry for that last bit of hypobole (a word I've invented, meaning the under-exaggeration of something for comedic effect) but I wasn't going to get a chance to use it for The Conversation. Which is unfortunate, because it's a movie that's all about playing things down. Dialing up the tension by making it more subtle. In many ways, it's a little bit like the first film I discussed in that it's about a private investigator who gets in over his head. Okay, that's basically the same overall plot. BUT it's done completely differently. It's a Coppola film (who officially had 2/5 of the year's nominees, impressive) but it doesn't completely play like one. This could be because he wrote it in 1966, prior to his Academy Award winning screenplays/movies. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a great movie, but I thought it was quite well done. Gene Hackman plays the anti Gene Hackman in this movie: a fascinating voyeur called Harry Caul. Okay, he's not really a voyeur since he doesn't look at people from afar for twisted pleasure. It's his job. He listens in on people's conversations from afar for the purposes of exposing possible affairs, general misconduct, etc. His theory is that people feel safe to talk in public and so that's the best place to eavesdrop. Plus, it's not technically illegal to listen to someone's public conversation. Not sure if it's still legal with all of the equipment and whatnot, but I doubt Harry cares. What makes him so fascinating is that he has trouble connecting with real people. He spends so much time watching them from afar that he can't see them as anything but points of interest. Self-serving motives and conspiracies walking around in human form. One particular conversation gives him cause for alarm because he believes that a murder is being plotted (by none other than young and kinda spindly Harrison Ford, who sort of looked like me once). There are, of course, many moral dilemmas surrounding how he should handle this situation. Because if he reveals how he knows, that could destroy his business and even get him into serious trouble. But he also doesn't want to get someone killed. But were they being serious when they said that or just vocalizing some frustrations? These all run through Harry's mind, and reminded me a little bit too much of myself. The manner in which he listened and re-listened and re-re-listened to the same patch of audio was comparable to the constant over-analyzation that happens in my head on a daily basis. And by the time it's the end of the movie, he's gotten so paranoid that he's torn his apartment asunder. All that remained was him and his saxophone. I'd rather not end up like that. Mostly because I can't play the saxophone. I kind of ruined the ending, but I doubt many people will go watch this movie. It's appropriately slow-moving but that wouldn't work for a lot of people. I'm glad that I was in just the right mood to watch it when I did because I highly enjoyed it. I believe my dad referred to it as "an interesting little movie" and I couldn't put it better myself.
Another interesting little movie is Lenny. In fact, I found it far more interesting and entertaining than Lenny Bruce's actual standup routines. I listened to several of them for an American Humor class and I found them to be vulgar just to be vulgar. Something that exists just to exist or just to make people mad is never funny to me. BUT when you watch it from the point of view of someone who was around at the time, it becomes a lot more heroic. Not funnier, just heroic. Although the line about how "it's a good thing we didn't kill Jesus nowadays because then little schoolkids would be wearing electric chairs around their necks" was pretty brilliant and made me laugh out loud. In fact, a lot of the best parts of dialogue weren't necessarily funny but they were interesting. And I agreed with most of it, which is always pleasant. It's weird to watch this and something like Network and think to myself, "I said something just like that the other day! Except without the F-bombs!" And it's all every bit as relevant today as it was then. Because even though we don't have comedians being dragged off by the police anymore, at least not for the content of their standup, we do have the same odd cultural norms. You can show fairly extreme violence on network TV, even more extreme if it's a cartoon, but say the F-word that every kid hears in school anyway? Forget it. I can write about any number of terrible things from a movie, but if I say bad words then I'd have a stigma attached. Let me rephrase: if enough people read my blog to allow for the possibility of a stigma, I'd have a stigma attached. And that's a bit silly. I knew that Lenny was a pioneer in this way, but I only knew it abstractly. Seeing it portrayed was entirely different, and now he's kind of my hero. Dustin Hoffman gets on my nerves at times but in this movie he's excellent. What I don't understand is why Valerie Perrine won for supporting actress that year (she plays his stripper wife, or if you find that offensive: his exotic dancer wife). She's pretty much in the movie for about 12 minutes and 3 of those are just her taking off her clothes. So either the voters that year were adolescent boys or they were middle-aged men who couldn't afford Playboy subscriptions. Yep, that's the one. Though the film is almost 2 hours long, it doesn't feel that long. The pacing that director Bob Fosse uses is just perfect. There's just enough standup material and behind-the-scenes drama. He balanced it out so well and I give him credit for that. Because of that and because the writing was good and I liked the black and white cinematography, this is the rare acting-driven film where I endorse its nomination for Best Picture. I doubt there will be many more of those. So take a good look Michael, because it's the last time. I am just rolling with the obscure references today.
And I'll probably need a lot of them to make this movie interesting: The Towering Inferno. This is quite seriously junk. Its only redeeming quality is its John Williams score and this was early in his career so we'll forgive him. I'm not sure how great actors like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway got mixed up in this nonsense. I was completely not surprised to learn that this was originally two movies that were so similar that they decided to just make it one movie. And they gave it a double-feature length of 2 hours and 44 minutes. That might be okay if the two movies being combined were based on books that were different. Then you've got multiple plots to fill up the running time. But this is based on two disaster books and they come together to form almost 3 hours of "there's a fire in the tallest building on Earth and we need to get everyone out safely." Oh. My. God. That's the basic premise of Rescue Me and even they have never done an entire episode of just rescuing people from a fire. So if they can't fill up 44 minutes with it, how did these people fill up that amount of time plus another 2 hours? Answer: they did not. Well, they did but it's not good. And the screenwriter's name is Sterling Silliphant which can't actually be a real name. That has to be a slight alteration of "hurling siccophant" which is probably what he felt like when he wrote it. This is a studio film if ever there was one. A mish-mash of popular actors in a movie with a lot of effects and very little plot. It was the Avatar of its day. You were waiting for me to say that, right? Well at least the one with the blue people has some awesome fighting at the end. All this has is fire-fighting. I have nothing but respect for the brave men and women who dedicate their lives to saving people from deadly fires. I also have nothing but respect for brave men and women who dedicate their lives to saving people from congenital heart defects, but I wouldn't want to watch 3 hours of that either. I really don't know what else to say, except that I guess it's interesting (comforting? disturbing? anthropologically fascinating?) to note that disaster movies wowed the mindless masses back then just as they do today.
A movie that couldn't be any more the opposite in terms of both the audience it attracts and the quality it possesses is this year's winner and a true masterpiece: The Godfather Part II. Holy freaking crap. There are great movies and then there are movies like this. I don't know how Coppola continued being motivated to make movies, because this was part 2 of not only his career high point but also filmmaking in general. Along with its predecessor, it makes up the only instance in history where a film and its sequel won Best Picture. That will probably never happen again. And I kind of hope it doesn't. For the record, I am more a fan of the first film. Not that I think the difference in quality is too vast, I just prefer the "nice guy turning bad" story to the "bad guy turning worse" story. Although this film actually gives you both, since it is a prequel and a sequel tied up in one. If they tried to do that today it'd be a regular length movie and it would kind of suck. But they gave it the full 200 minutes that it deserves, and I have not once noticed the time going by in the 5 or 6 times that I've seen it. I'll avoid mentioning too many plot details, since if you haven't watched it then you should immediately do so and stop being a human being with no taste. I do feel kind of bad for Al Pacino, because he does an incredible job in this movie but he once again has the show stolen by the actor playing his father. This time it was DeNiro and not Brando. I believe this is the only time that two actors have won an Oscar for playing the same character but I could be wrong. Anyway, the best aspects of these films are the little moments. The fact that the first movie ended on Kay being shut out of Michael's life with the famous door closing on her and in this movie he shuts the door on her himself. Brilliant. Because in a single scene it encapsulates the entire journey of their relationship. The music is wonderful and subtle. The violence is especially well done, because it isn't too gory. It's not tame either. This makes it quite realistic and kind of disturbing. It makes you realize the seriousness of the violence as though it's actually happening, and not as though you're watching a baggie full of food coloring exploding. The film somehow finds a way to forward the plot while delving deeper into the characters. The dialogue is filled with double-speak and straight-up lies. It was so daring to put forth a movie so potentially confusing and expecting audiences to get it. And the film's ultimate betrayal is realized so simply, in such a little moment. That's perfect, because people who lie for a living aren't going to majorly screw up and let loose the important secrets. No character's motivation feels unreasonable. There are no true villains or heroes because everyone has an agenda and pursues it in a very human, very flawed manner. I could go on and on about it, but it'd be insulting to suggest that I could sum up its brilliance in a single paragraph. I once wrote a 12 page paper that compared this film series with The Sopranos TV series and I pretty much only talked about 2 or 3 scenes. Anyway, it's the rare movie that lives up to the hype. My Creative Writing teacher once said that it, along with the first movie, were her favorite films because they're "like artwork that moves" and I'd say that's pretty perfect.
Notice how all of my mentors sum things up succinctly? That's a trick I've never quite learned. As my college professor said Jonathan Swift said, "sorry for the length of this letter, I didn't have time to write a short one." Love that. Thankfully, Coppola didn't know that quote because shorter wouldn't have worked. So this was one of the best years, because it had one of the best movies. But I was surprised by the quality of the other nominees as well. That's why it took me about a week to run through them instead of close to a month. I can't say the next year will be the same, only that it will include growing up in the 60s, growing up on the street, and growing up as a demon.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
1975: The Year that Doc Brown, the Joker, and Grima Wormtongue Walked Into a Bar
I guess the actor who played the Penguin was there too. But why would the Joker go to a bar with the Penguin? Penguin is a classy guy and he would not hang out in the type of dive that the Joker frequents. Whereas Grima Wormtongue is from Middle Earth and thus used to seedy places, and what's the only way he could be brought into the present to hang with Joker? Via Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine. My ridiculous title makes sense now doesn't it? Yeah, I thought so. Of course it's an insane asylum and not a bar that they're in, but the other movies in this year don't give me any good title material so there you go. It was a good year though, the worst of it was still pretty good.
This first one is the worst of it, but it's still pretty good: Barry Lyndon. Coincidentally, I've had this on my instant watch of netflix for about 8 months or something crazy. I put it on because it's a Kubrick film and I didn't watch it right away because it's like 3 hours long. And not LOTR 3 hours. Not even Titanic 3 hours. More like The Patriot director's cut 3 hours but without the action, excitement, or compelling story. It's basically a period piece from the colonial era in Europe but I couldn't tell if it was kind of making fun of movies like that or if it just was one. Because it's an adaptation of a book that was written in that time period, but I find it hard to believe that Stanley Kubrick would just up and make a period piece that didn't make some sort of modern statement on society. But I'm not sure what it was, because it's tough for me to get things out of movies that I don't care about. It's a beautifully filmed movie and it's well-acted but it's just so meh. The main guy is a colonial tool who gets screwed over by other colonial tools and then ventures across Europe to marry a woman who has a son who is a tool. That son then shoots the main guy in the leg during a duel that lasts entirely too long and that's pretty much the whole movie. It wasn't boring exactly, although I'm not sure why. By all means it should have been boring. The classical music selections and picturesque visuals keep the viewer somewhat invested but there really wasn't much more to it than that. I'd say it was largely a character study, but none of the characters are particularly interesting and they don't really change much. So it's kind of a slice-of-life movie that just happens to take place in 1700s Europe. Let's just say I did a few crosswords during it.
A far more compelling film, although unfortunately not as much for me as it was for people at the time, is Dog Day Afternoon. It's a true story of a man who robbed a bank in New York City in order to get money for his lover's sex change operation. If someone had pitched that as a screenplay, it probably would've gotten shot down. Which is why it's annoying when people say, "that would never happen in real life." Because I say: if everything occurring is physically possible then I buy it. Chance meetings? I buy it. Strange or minor reasons for doing bad things? Sadly, I buy this too because I've read some crazy real stuff. Shooting people while skydiving is a bit iffy. I might not buy that. The story of this film is mostly the backdrop though. And that's just as well because placing the entire focus on the robbery/hostage situation instead makes for a compelling film. The problem with viewing it in a modern context is that basically every movie with this plotline copies the style that this film establishes. So I felt like I had watched this before on TV many times, but I tried my best to watch it objectively. And I must say: they did a pretty superb job. The choice to have a lack of makeup on the actors was a good one because you can really see the exhaustion on their faces, the sweat, and the intensity. I've seen some pretty great makeup jobs where they can make it look like someone is out of it and dirty, but there's really no substitute for actual human skin pigment. I know that sounds weird, but it all comes off as so much more realistic because Pacino doesn't look like he just exited his trailer. He looks like he has legitimately been holding hostages for 12 hours with no nourishment or rest. John Cazale plays his accomplice, in a very non-Fredo like performance. Not just because he has hair in this one. He does a solid job but Pacino easily steals the show, as he often does. There are plenty of little touches throughout the film that really add to the overall effect but are tough to put your finger on. Moments such as pieces of dialogue that are kind of rocky, with less flow than usual. This is quite realistic, especially for a high-adrenaline situation. So I really give the filmmakers credit for taking a story that can be summed up in a headline (as it was, many many times) and really pulling the viewer in and immersing them in the experience. It's largely a product of its time and doesn't make as much of an impact this far from Vietnam-era cynicism, but it's definitely a well-done movie.
A somewhat groundbreaking picture that I find to be somewhat overrated, and this may shock you, is Jaws. Of course, this is always going to happen when you hear too much about a big movie before you see it. I watched it for the first time about five years ago, maybe a little less, but for as far back as I can remember I have been hearing about this film. I even went on the ride at Universal Studios. Although it was more of a waiting line than a ride, along the lines of the classic "want some salad with that dressing?" situation. 3 hours of line = 5 minutes of riding in the water with a fake shark. But stuff blew up and the shark got all bloody so that was pretty cool. The film itself feels kind of the same though: almost a whole movie of looking for a shark and then the shark gets blown up at the end. This is all delivered really well, mostly because of John Williams' iconic score. Though this wasn't the first American film to feature a prominent and iconic music score, it was probably the first time that people could recognize the music anywhere and instantly remember what it meant. The music itself became as much a part of pop culture as the movie itself did, if not more so. But aside from the music, which is fantastic, a lot of the movie is filler. I think it was so refreshing when it came out to have a "horror" movie, or more accurately a "suspense" movie, that wasn't filled with cliché characters and gore. There's no question that the movie effectively builds suspense without really showing the shark, and that the characters are fleshed out really well by 3 great actors: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss. The problem is that when the movie goes on for as long as it does (just over 2 hours) a lot of the suspense dies down. And whereas it's initially compelling to watch three characters who "aren't really chasing the shark, they're chasing their own insecurities," by the time you're halfway through the film you feel like they're just in therapy and they should be paying you for your time. Not to say that any of the scenes were poorly written or poorly delivered, it just gets kind of old after a while. Once the drama between the characters heats up it's better, and of course the initial beach attack and finale are pretty great, but it would seem to me that such an iconic and famous film should hold that standing for more than "it was pretty scary." Granted, if I had watched it with friends as a child then I would probably feel differently because I'd have memories of jumping around and screaming with my buddies. That's what I like to call the "Ghostbusters effect." Because I only just saw that movie this year and I thought it was stupid. Had I seen it as a kid: it would be nostalgic. As it stands to me today it wasn't that funny. But anyway, this movie certainly earned its win for original music score and I give it credit for breaking some established barriers of film. But if you haven't seen it then you should keep your expectations fairly low and you'll probably enjoy yourself.
Conversely, a movie that's tough to enjoy at all is Nashville. Literally the only reason is that it's too long. The film is supposed to satirize the absurdity of many aspects of country music, and so for the first half of the film I was enjoying the statements they were making. But when a movie is 3 hours long it ceases to be satire and becomes what it's satirizing. Especially when it's about a bunch of ridiculous people who take themselves too seriously. Because then when you're spending 3 hours on trying to make your audience become invested in the characters, then you're legitimizing caricatures. That just doesn't work. It'd be like if a Marx brothers movie went on for several hours and Harpo ended up dying for some reason. Also: a large part of the movie (seriously about an hour or something crazy) is actual country music. Original songs written and performed by the actors. Which is pretty impressive. But once again: you're trying to give the viewer as authentic a Nashville experience as possible while still telling them that Nashville is melodramatic. That just doesn't work. On a positive note: it does kind of pave the way for the mockumentary. And while it would be others who would perfect the genre, I give them credit for creating it. If I find out they did not, in fact, create it then it will have little to no redeeming value. I liked many of the points that it made about the superficiality of the business but it all gets lost in the endless solos and twang-y accents.
Easily the best of the nominees and well-deserving of the win for 1975 is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It won for picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay. Only one movie had done this previously (in 1934, a year I'll get to in a long long time. If I'm still unemployed when I get there, come kill me) and only one movie has done it since. I'd tell you which but I already wrote about it. Use this as an opportunity to reread all of my blog entries, it's a nice way to spend several afternoons and a lunch break. This movie centers around a criminal (Nicholson in easily his finest performance, because he's not playing himself quite as much as usual) who is pretending to be crazy so that he can avoid hard time in prison and instead spend some leisurely time in an institution. So right off the bat this movie is brilliant. You've got a criminal exploiting the system (social commentary), the inevitable "plan blowing up in his face" (Greek tragedy when done well), and a sense of existential dystopianism (two words I like to put together). The hitch in the plan is of course the infamous Nurse Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher, the matriarch of the mental asylum. She plays her role so coldly and so subdued that the viewer becomes as frustrated as Nicholson's character, in an effective way. All you want is for the woman to show some genuine frustration, some weakness that would imply a lack of invincibility. But these moments are rare, and when they happen she usually just strikes back and makes things worse than they were before. Outstanding. In addition to the main two players, this film has a ton of future stars that flesh out the incredible supporting cast. Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and Brad Dourif (from LOTR) among them. The film is bleak, meaningful, and almost completely lacking in redemption. That's the kind of movie I love, because it makes its point powerfully in such a way that you don't need to rewatch it. You should probably avoiding rewatching it too much anyway, lest you end up in the same situation as the characters. But the movie shows human nature as it truly is at its worst: ugly and self-serving. It's also an important film because it's bleak without venturing into the realm of film noir. The reason that's so significant is that you expect film noir to end badly. That's the genre. But this is just a drama, so it tells audiences that just because there's no hard-boiled detective or smoking hot femme fatale doesn't mean that things won't turn sour in the end. Much more shocking, unless of course some blogger ruins it for you. In my experience so far, this is one of the best movies I've watched on Netflix Instant Watch so you should check it out if you have that service (I highly recommend it. Can they pay me for all of these endorsements please?).
Not a bad year by any means, and I could be wrong but I think it's taking me significantly less time to get through the 70s than the 80s. AND the obscene amount of TV shows that I watch are all on now so you'd think I wouldn't be watching as much. Pretty great stuff. I'm not quite done with 1974 yet but I'm close. It's a year I've been looking forward to for years, some of you might know why. Just as a hint, more of a huge giveaway, the year will include neo-noir, post-modern b&w, and some fancy term for: the sequel to the greatest movie of all time.
This first one is the worst of it, but it's still pretty good: Barry Lyndon. Coincidentally, I've had this on my instant watch of netflix for about 8 months or something crazy. I put it on because it's a Kubrick film and I didn't watch it right away because it's like 3 hours long. And not LOTR 3 hours. Not even Titanic 3 hours. More like The Patriot director's cut 3 hours but without the action, excitement, or compelling story. It's basically a period piece from the colonial era in Europe but I couldn't tell if it was kind of making fun of movies like that or if it just was one. Because it's an adaptation of a book that was written in that time period, but I find it hard to believe that Stanley Kubrick would just up and make a period piece that didn't make some sort of modern statement on society. But I'm not sure what it was, because it's tough for me to get things out of movies that I don't care about. It's a beautifully filmed movie and it's well-acted but it's just so meh. The main guy is a colonial tool who gets screwed over by other colonial tools and then ventures across Europe to marry a woman who has a son who is a tool. That son then shoots the main guy in the leg during a duel that lasts entirely too long and that's pretty much the whole movie. It wasn't boring exactly, although I'm not sure why. By all means it should have been boring. The classical music selections and picturesque visuals keep the viewer somewhat invested but there really wasn't much more to it than that. I'd say it was largely a character study, but none of the characters are particularly interesting and they don't really change much. So it's kind of a slice-of-life movie that just happens to take place in 1700s Europe. Let's just say I did a few crosswords during it.
A far more compelling film, although unfortunately not as much for me as it was for people at the time, is Dog Day Afternoon. It's a true story of a man who robbed a bank in New York City in order to get money for his lover's sex change operation. If someone had pitched that as a screenplay, it probably would've gotten shot down. Which is why it's annoying when people say, "that would never happen in real life." Because I say: if everything occurring is physically possible then I buy it. Chance meetings? I buy it. Strange or minor reasons for doing bad things? Sadly, I buy this too because I've read some crazy real stuff. Shooting people while skydiving is a bit iffy. I might not buy that. The story of this film is mostly the backdrop though. And that's just as well because placing the entire focus on the robbery/hostage situation instead makes for a compelling film. The problem with viewing it in a modern context is that basically every movie with this plotline copies the style that this film establishes. So I felt like I had watched this before on TV many times, but I tried my best to watch it objectively. And I must say: they did a pretty superb job. The choice to have a lack of makeup on the actors was a good one because you can really see the exhaustion on their faces, the sweat, and the intensity. I've seen some pretty great makeup jobs where they can make it look like someone is out of it and dirty, but there's really no substitute for actual human skin pigment. I know that sounds weird, but it all comes off as so much more realistic because Pacino doesn't look like he just exited his trailer. He looks like he has legitimately been holding hostages for 12 hours with no nourishment or rest. John Cazale plays his accomplice, in a very non-Fredo like performance. Not just because he has hair in this one. He does a solid job but Pacino easily steals the show, as he often does. There are plenty of little touches throughout the film that really add to the overall effect but are tough to put your finger on. Moments such as pieces of dialogue that are kind of rocky, with less flow than usual. This is quite realistic, especially for a high-adrenaline situation. So I really give the filmmakers credit for taking a story that can be summed up in a headline (as it was, many many times) and really pulling the viewer in and immersing them in the experience. It's largely a product of its time and doesn't make as much of an impact this far from Vietnam-era cynicism, but it's definitely a well-done movie.
A somewhat groundbreaking picture that I find to be somewhat overrated, and this may shock you, is Jaws. Of course, this is always going to happen when you hear too much about a big movie before you see it. I watched it for the first time about five years ago, maybe a little less, but for as far back as I can remember I have been hearing about this film. I even went on the ride at Universal Studios. Although it was more of a waiting line than a ride, along the lines of the classic "want some salad with that dressing?" situation. 3 hours of line = 5 minutes of riding in the water with a fake shark. But stuff blew up and the shark got all bloody so that was pretty cool. The film itself feels kind of the same though: almost a whole movie of looking for a shark and then the shark gets blown up at the end. This is all delivered really well, mostly because of John Williams' iconic score. Though this wasn't the first American film to feature a prominent and iconic music score, it was probably the first time that people could recognize the music anywhere and instantly remember what it meant. The music itself became as much a part of pop culture as the movie itself did, if not more so. But aside from the music, which is fantastic, a lot of the movie is filler. I think it was so refreshing when it came out to have a "horror" movie, or more accurately a "suspense" movie, that wasn't filled with cliché characters and gore. There's no question that the movie effectively builds suspense without really showing the shark, and that the characters are fleshed out really well by 3 great actors: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss. The problem is that when the movie goes on for as long as it does (just over 2 hours) a lot of the suspense dies down. And whereas it's initially compelling to watch three characters who "aren't really chasing the shark, they're chasing their own insecurities," by the time you're halfway through the film you feel like they're just in therapy and they should be paying you for your time. Not to say that any of the scenes were poorly written or poorly delivered, it just gets kind of old after a while. Once the drama between the characters heats up it's better, and of course the initial beach attack and finale are pretty great, but it would seem to me that such an iconic and famous film should hold that standing for more than "it was pretty scary." Granted, if I had watched it with friends as a child then I would probably feel differently because I'd have memories of jumping around and screaming with my buddies. That's what I like to call the "Ghostbusters effect." Because I only just saw that movie this year and I thought it was stupid. Had I seen it as a kid: it would be nostalgic. As it stands to me today it wasn't that funny. But anyway, this movie certainly earned its win for original music score and I give it credit for breaking some established barriers of film. But if you haven't seen it then you should keep your expectations fairly low and you'll probably enjoy yourself.
Conversely, a movie that's tough to enjoy at all is Nashville. Literally the only reason is that it's too long. The film is supposed to satirize the absurdity of many aspects of country music, and so for the first half of the film I was enjoying the statements they were making. But when a movie is 3 hours long it ceases to be satire and becomes what it's satirizing. Especially when it's about a bunch of ridiculous people who take themselves too seriously. Because then when you're spending 3 hours on trying to make your audience become invested in the characters, then you're legitimizing caricatures. That just doesn't work. It'd be like if a Marx brothers movie went on for several hours and Harpo ended up dying for some reason. Also: a large part of the movie (seriously about an hour or something crazy) is actual country music. Original songs written and performed by the actors. Which is pretty impressive. But once again: you're trying to give the viewer as authentic a Nashville experience as possible while still telling them that Nashville is melodramatic. That just doesn't work. On a positive note: it does kind of pave the way for the mockumentary. And while it would be others who would perfect the genre, I give them credit for creating it. If I find out they did not, in fact, create it then it will have little to no redeeming value. I liked many of the points that it made about the superficiality of the business but it all gets lost in the endless solos and twang-y accents.
Easily the best of the nominees and well-deserving of the win for 1975 is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It won for picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay. Only one movie had done this previously (in 1934, a year I'll get to in a long long time. If I'm still unemployed when I get there, come kill me) and only one movie has done it since. I'd tell you which but I already wrote about it. Use this as an opportunity to reread all of my blog entries, it's a nice way to spend several afternoons and a lunch break. This movie centers around a criminal (Nicholson in easily his finest performance, because he's not playing himself quite as much as usual) who is pretending to be crazy so that he can avoid hard time in prison and instead spend some leisurely time in an institution. So right off the bat this movie is brilliant. You've got a criminal exploiting the system (social commentary), the inevitable "plan blowing up in his face" (Greek tragedy when done well), and a sense of existential dystopianism (two words I like to put together). The hitch in the plan is of course the infamous Nurse Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher, the matriarch of the mental asylum. She plays her role so coldly and so subdued that the viewer becomes as frustrated as Nicholson's character, in an effective way. All you want is for the woman to show some genuine frustration, some weakness that would imply a lack of invincibility. But these moments are rare, and when they happen she usually just strikes back and makes things worse than they were before. Outstanding. In addition to the main two players, this film has a ton of future stars that flesh out the incredible supporting cast. Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and Brad Dourif (from LOTR) among them. The film is bleak, meaningful, and almost completely lacking in redemption. That's the kind of movie I love, because it makes its point powerfully in such a way that you don't need to rewatch it. You should probably avoiding rewatching it too much anyway, lest you end up in the same situation as the characters. But the movie shows human nature as it truly is at its worst: ugly and self-serving. It's also an important film because it's bleak without venturing into the realm of film noir. The reason that's so significant is that you expect film noir to end badly. That's the genre. But this is just a drama, so it tells audiences that just because there's no hard-boiled detective or smoking hot femme fatale doesn't mean that things won't turn sour in the end. Much more shocking, unless of course some blogger ruins it for you. In my experience so far, this is one of the best movies I've watched on Netflix Instant Watch so you should check it out if you have that service (I highly recommend it. Can they pay me for all of these endorsements please?).
Not a bad year by any means, and I could be wrong but I think it's taking me significantly less time to get through the 70s than the 80s. AND the obscene amount of TV shows that I watch are all on now so you'd think I wouldn't be watching as much. Pretty great stuff. I'm not quite done with 1974 yet but I'm close. It's a year I've been looking forward to for years, some of you might know why. Just as a hint, more of a huge giveaway, the year will include neo-noir, post-modern b&w, and some fancy term for: the sequel to the greatest movie of all time.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
1976: The Year that The Italian Stallion and Tricky Dick Faced Off
Best celebrity death match ever? I think so. I know I just put up a blog like two days ago, but I had already seen a few of the films for this year since they're actually good. Don't worry: there's still plenty to complain about. But this year also contains yet another of my childhood (or pre-teenhood as it were) favorites and also a film that is now one of my all-time favorites too! America celebrated its 200th birthday by not making me angry. Stay classy, USA.
Just not with this movie, one of the most overrated that I've seen recently: All The President's Men. I'm going to give it faux brownie points for assuming that it's a take-off of "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty back together again." If not, then it loses one of its only creative aspects. The film gives us such a realistic portrayal of the Watergate investigation that it's really quite boring at times. And I can't imagine it being interesting to people in 1976, all of whom knew about President Nixon's infamous scandal. I've said this before and I'll say it again: illustrating an injustice that everyone already knows about is neither brave nor interesting. It just...is. And they could have at least done something interesting with the filmmaking. The opening of the film and the exact end are done in an interesting fashion, but the other 2 hours and something basically give you the same experience you would have sitting in an editor's office. The Netflix sleeve told me the movie is still shown to journalism students, well good! It'll give them an idea of how tedious their jobs will be. But since when are Troy McClure-esque films worthy of the Academy's recommendation? In addition, the movie has like 11 F-words and it's rated PG! It was initially rated R but they lowered it because it "carries important social significance." Translation: we don't want to negatively influence children unless we're also teaching them something that they could learn from literally any newspaper, radio station, or hobo on the street. Slightly-more-cynical-but-probably-more-accurate-translation: even though everybody already hates Nixon we want to make sure they also hate him at the movies. It's all just one big social statement, which would be fine except the entire movie consists of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman talking to people on the phone. That's as creative as it gets. Ron Howard's excellent 2008 film Frost/Nixon illustrates many of the same points as this movie while also giving us some interesting insight. I completely endorse and appreciate social/political commentary in film but I think it should be displayed in a thought-provoking fashion and not just as a really long episode of 20/20. On a positive note, the acting is solid and the writing is good. But that's about it. And the AFI added it to their top 100 list just after Deepthroat's identity was brought to light. Hmmm...how interesting. Feebly trying to remain socially relevant AFI? For shame.
Somewhat in the same category, though certainly better, is the movie Bound For Glory. This film deals with a lot of the same issues as one of my most universally despised books: "The Grapes of Wrath." I'd rant about that now but I have to save it for the movie version from the 40s, which I'll probably get to sometime around the alleged Mayan apocalypse. Anyway, the movie illustrates many of the societal problems that occurred during the "dust bowl" period of American history, and at least does so in a comparatively interesting fashion unlike the movie I was just talking about. The film is about a guy, played by David Carradine, who wanders around the American West and finds people who are having trouble while also befriending and helping them...wait a second, isn't that the plot to Kung Fu? I mean, it's based on a true story...so it's more probable that Kung Fu was the television adaptation of Woody Guthrie's life, where he beat people up instead of singing songs with his guitar, and then when the show was canceled they decided to adapt the story more accurately with a film version. That is the indisputable truth on the subject, the foot has spoken. Anyway, if you've heard the song "This Land is Your Land" (or more importantly: the Jib-Jab version) then this is the story of the guy who wrote that song. It's also about that guy if you haven't heard the song. Much like Nixon's movie, this film goes on for too long while essentially making the same point over and over again. But it's long enough after the real-life events that inspired the movie that the initial point-making is at least justified. The story is essentially what I've already described, but the nuances are too varied to list here. They include various ways of portraying how bad it was for many citizens back then, especially citizens who made their living through farming. Woody Guthrie used his gift of singing and song-writing to give a voice to the plight of the common farmer, to the point that he even refused to become consumerized/famous/rich. If that's the way he wanted to live then I guess that's respectable, as long as it was for his own peace of mind and not because he thought it would be unfair to people who couldn't sing or write songs. Because then that's just dumb. And as Quark once said on DS9: "dignity in an empty sack is worth the sack." I jest, but in all seriousness I think it's cool that he lived his life the way he wanted to live it by using his music to bring hope to those that really needed it and not Ivy League college students who would listen to his music and ergo felt they were entitled to say they "recognized with the commoner." As I said, the movie goes on a bit long for what it is but it also has some filmmaking innovations that are difficult to notice today (since they're now in every movie). So I give the director of photography his due credit and I'll say it's a fairly solid movie overall.
A movie that I found to be quite outstanding is Network. What a great film. I felt like I might have written it, if I wasn't -12 at the time. And it was interesting to note how many of the issues raised in the story are still incredibly relevant today. I'm sure I won't do the movie justice by writing about it now, because I've only seen it once and it's fairly layered. But I shall do my best. At its simplest: it's about a TV anchor near the end of his career who is fed up with the system. It's also about the TV station itself as it struggles with low ratings. The whole thing is done in a darkly funny and satirical way, but like most satire it has a deeply serious message. In this case: the tendency of human beings (and especially Americans) to blindly follow things and people they don't fully understand. Howard Beale (played superbly by Peter Finch) delivers his now-famous "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" speech right from the deepest depths of his soul. He was trying to tell everyone that the system was a sham and that they should destroy it before it took over their lives more than it already had. So what did the network do? They made his speech the catchphrase for his new show. They turned a rant against mindless viewership into a vehicle for mindless viewership. That is truly brilliant. Because even when people think they're opposing "The Man" they're really just serving a different "The Man" or possibly even the same one. Which is why my motto isn't "stick it to The Man" but rather "sometimes The Man is too big to be stuck." I recognize the system as ridiculous so I don't let it get to me, but I also have no delusions about changing the entire nation's way of thinking. But to return to the movie: the ending is a bit over-the-top but it fits with the satirical and already slightly over-the-top tone of the film. It can be overly chatty at times but the ideas being spoken are all quite fascinating and important to think about. Roger Ebert said that the film was "like prophecy" and I couldn't agree more. During one of the longer speeches near the end I couldn't help but think of Jersey Shore and the umpteenth amount of Saw sequels. The acting, directing, and writing of the film are all top notch. It's simply a movie that everyone should watch. I'm a big fan of this year's winner, and I understand why it won and I'm glad it won, but this is probably the better film and in another year it might have had a shot. It didn't fade into obscurity though and it's still rightfully listed on many lists as one of the best movies ever, so that's not too shabby.
Another great and somewhat depressing movie is Taxi Driver. Actually, change that to "definitely depressing." I probably should've watched this movie again as I've only seen it once and that was three-and-a-half years ago. I remember because I initially bought and watched it when it was recommended to me by the TA in my Study of Film class (which I may or may not have mentioned before, but it was the best class ever). He described it to me as an "Eastern" because it's essentially a Western in New York City in what was then the modern day. Now here's an example of a film that subtly deals with Vietnam-era America without being preachy. Travis Bickle is a former Marine and a misanthrope who drives a cab and ends up befriending a young prostitute played by Jodie Foster. And as I'm sure you're aware this was the film that "inspired" John Hinckley Jr. to shoot Ronald Reagan. I've always found that to be quite disturbing on many levels. The most disturbing of which is that I could see shooting some Russian higher-ups to get Bond girls to like you, but going after the president for 13-year-old Jodie Foster? Gross. The film also made quite an impact when it came out due to its fairly extreme violence and non-heroic/disturbing protagonist. Because of these things it was one of the pioneer films for anti-heroes. Even though Dirty Harry was the first, and one of the best, he still comes off as fairly heroic. I'll talk about that more in my 1971 write-up. Travis Bickle was a pioneer not for guys like The Punisher and Jack Bauer, but for guys like Vic Mackey and Dexter Morgan (from The Shield and Dexter, respectively). We're talking about guys you cheer for even though you know you really, really shouldn't. Bickle was a man scarred by the war to such an extent that he couldn't connect with other human beings anymore. After forcing himself to view people as things in the war, he couldn't come back from that. And so a young girl that can only be helped (in his mind) by a killing machine was the perfect way for him to feel human again. It's all played as far more disturbing than that, but that's the gist. Here is yet another film that in another year might have netted itself the Oscar. Although I think both it and Network were a little too "out there" to win, I find it interesting that in some ways they're not "out there" enough to win today. Maybe in the 80s...we all know that decade of nominees needed them.
And after all of that build-up we are brought to this year's winner: Rocky. I've seen this movie SO many times because I was quasi-obsessed with the series when I was like 13 or 14. Today people might think of it as the stereotypical sports movie, but it was really the first of its kind in a lot of ways. Basically every sports movie that comes out is still compared to it. And after several years of nominees and winners that were mostly depressing (excellent, but depressing) I think the Academy wanted to restore some hope. And I can respect that, especially since it made the movie much like its titular hero: Rocky Balboa. There's been a lot of interesting analysis about the film in recent years, including that it's representative of the white man trying to rise to prominence in an age dominated by female and minority heroes (in real life, not the movies). This is of course exemplified by the fact that the main "antagonist" of the film is a black man: Apollo Creed. While this is interesting, Stallone wrote this movie over the course of merely a few days and Carl Weathers got the job because Stallone liked his attitude during an audition. So basically all of that analysis is crap. In that it wasn't the intended message, but I do find it interesting. And it's possible that those ideas were in the back of Stallone's mind. It's also possible the producers thought of it. So let's roll with that for a second: during the 60s and 70s there were plenty of people like Rocky who were struggling just as much as anybody but who were also villainized by society because that was when the idea of "the evil white man" was coming into prominence. And so the point of the film, whether you look at it that way or simply as an underdog story (for the record, I just view it as an underdog story but I thought it would be fun to share), is that the man who thought he was worthless proves that he is worth something. Not necessarily that he was the best (not until part 2 anyway) but that he was better than people thought he was. I think that's extraordinary, especially in today's society of: "if I'm not number 1 and if I don't get a nice shiny medal then I'm no good." Rocky sums it all up himself better than I could in the much overlooked and underrated sixth film, Rocky Balboa: "it ain't about how hard you hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." And that's a good lesson for anybody. But it's better learned if you just watch the first one, the other ones are more fun than philosophical. Also of note: Burgess Meredith's fantastic performance as Rocky's trainer Mickey and of course the iconic "Gonna Fly Now" music by Bill Conti. If you haven't seen the movie, there's something wrong with you. Seriously.
Isn't the 70s shaping up to be better than the 80s? I am once again correct, not that anyone should be surprised. It'll probably take me a bit longer to crank out 1975 because one of the movies is about 3 hours long and even though it's a Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket taught me that that's not quite as reliable as a Scorsese of Coppola film. But anyway, all I can say about the next year for now is that it'll include more country music, more iconic John Williams music, and the musical tones of Al Pacino firing weaponry.
Just not with this movie, one of the most overrated that I've seen recently: All The President's Men. I'm going to give it faux brownie points for assuming that it's a take-off of "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty back together again." If not, then it loses one of its only creative aspects. The film gives us such a realistic portrayal of the Watergate investigation that it's really quite boring at times. And I can't imagine it being interesting to people in 1976, all of whom knew about President Nixon's infamous scandal. I've said this before and I'll say it again: illustrating an injustice that everyone already knows about is neither brave nor interesting. It just...is. And they could have at least done something interesting with the filmmaking. The opening of the film and the exact end are done in an interesting fashion, but the other 2 hours and something basically give you the same experience you would have sitting in an editor's office. The Netflix sleeve told me the movie is still shown to journalism students, well good! It'll give them an idea of how tedious their jobs will be. But since when are Troy McClure-esque films worthy of the Academy's recommendation? In addition, the movie has like 11 F-words and it's rated PG! It was initially rated R but they lowered it because it "carries important social significance." Translation: we don't want to negatively influence children unless we're also teaching them something that they could learn from literally any newspaper, radio station, or hobo on the street. Slightly-more-cynical-but-probably-more-accurate-translation: even though everybody already hates Nixon we want to make sure they also hate him at the movies. It's all just one big social statement, which would be fine except the entire movie consists of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman talking to people on the phone. That's as creative as it gets. Ron Howard's excellent 2008 film Frost/Nixon illustrates many of the same points as this movie while also giving us some interesting insight. I completely endorse and appreciate social/political commentary in film but I think it should be displayed in a thought-provoking fashion and not just as a really long episode of 20/20. On a positive note, the acting is solid and the writing is good. But that's about it. And the AFI added it to their top 100 list just after Deepthroat's identity was brought to light. Hmmm...how interesting. Feebly trying to remain socially relevant AFI? For shame.
Somewhat in the same category, though certainly better, is the movie Bound For Glory. This film deals with a lot of the same issues as one of my most universally despised books: "The Grapes of Wrath." I'd rant about that now but I have to save it for the movie version from the 40s, which I'll probably get to sometime around the alleged Mayan apocalypse. Anyway, the movie illustrates many of the societal problems that occurred during the "dust bowl" period of American history, and at least does so in a comparatively interesting fashion unlike the movie I was just talking about. The film is about a guy, played by David Carradine, who wanders around the American West and finds people who are having trouble while also befriending and helping them...wait a second, isn't that the plot to Kung Fu? I mean, it's based on a true story...so it's more probable that Kung Fu was the television adaptation of Woody Guthrie's life, where he beat people up instead of singing songs with his guitar, and then when the show was canceled they decided to adapt the story more accurately with a film version. That is the indisputable truth on the subject, the foot has spoken. Anyway, if you've heard the song "This Land is Your Land" (or more importantly: the Jib-Jab version) then this is the story of the guy who wrote that song. It's also about that guy if you haven't heard the song. Much like Nixon's movie, this film goes on for too long while essentially making the same point over and over again. But it's long enough after the real-life events that inspired the movie that the initial point-making is at least justified. The story is essentially what I've already described, but the nuances are too varied to list here. They include various ways of portraying how bad it was for many citizens back then, especially citizens who made their living through farming. Woody Guthrie used his gift of singing and song-writing to give a voice to the plight of the common farmer, to the point that he even refused to become consumerized/famous/rich. If that's the way he wanted to live then I guess that's respectable, as long as it was for his own peace of mind and not because he thought it would be unfair to people who couldn't sing or write songs. Because then that's just dumb. And as Quark once said on DS9: "dignity in an empty sack is worth the sack." I jest, but in all seriousness I think it's cool that he lived his life the way he wanted to live it by using his music to bring hope to those that really needed it and not Ivy League college students who would listen to his music and ergo felt they were entitled to say they "recognized with the commoner." As I said, the movie goes on a bit long for what it is but it also has some filmmaking innovations that are difficult to notice today (since they're now in every movie). So I give the director of photography his due credit and I'll say it's a fairly solid movie overall.
A movie that I found to be quite outstanding is Network. What a great film. I felt like I might have written it, if I wasn't -12 at the time. And it was interesting to note how many of the issues raised in the story are still incredibly relevant today. I'm sure I won't do the movie justice by writing about it now, because I've only seen it once and it's fairly layered. But I shall do my best. At its simplest: it's about a TV anchor near the end of his career who is fed up with the system. It's also about the TV station itself as it struggles with low ratings. The whole thing is done in a darkly funny and satirical way, but like most satire it has a deeply serious message. In this case: the tendency of human beings (and especially Americans) to blindly follow things and people they don't fully understand. Howard Beale (played superbly by Peter Finch) delivers his now-famous "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" speech right from the deepest depths of his soul. He was trying to tell everyone that the system was a sham and that they should destroy it before it took over their lives more than it already had. So what did the network do? They made his speech the catchphrase for his new show. They turned a rant against mindless viewership into a vehicle for mindless viewership. That is truly brilliant. Because even when people think they're opposing "The Man" they're really just serving a different "The Man" or possibly even the same one. Which is why my motto isn't "stick it to The Man" but rather "sometimes The Man is too big to be stuck." I recognize the system as ridiculous so I don't let it get to me, but I also have no delusions about changing the entire nation's way of thinking. But to return to the movie: the ending is a bit over-the-top but it fits with the satirical and already slightly over-the-top tone of the film. It can be overly chatty at times but the ideas being spoken are all quite fascinating and important to think about. Roger Ebert said that the film was "like prophecy" and I couldn't agree more. During one of the longer speeches near the end I couldn't help but think of Jersey Shore and the umpteenth amount of Saw sequels. The acting, directing, and writing of the film are all top notch. It's simply a movie that everyone should watch. I'm a big fan of this year's winner, and I understand why it won and I'm glad it won, but this is probably the better film and in another year it might have had a shot. It didn't fade into obscurity though and it's still rightfully listed on many lists as one of the best movies ever, so that's not too shabby.
Another great and somewhat depressing movie is Taxi Driver. Actually, change that to "definitely depressing." I probably should've watched this movie again as I've only seen it once and that was three-and-a-half years ago. I remember because I initially bought and watched it when it was recommended to me by the TA in my Study of Film class (which I may or may not have mentioned before, but it was the best class ever). He described it to me as an "Eastern" because it's essentially a Western in New York City in what was then the modern day. Now here's an example of a film that subtly deals with Vietnam-era America without being preachy. Travis Bickle is a former Marine and a misanthrope who drives a cab and ends up befriending a young prostitute played by Jodie Foster. And as I'm sure you're aware this was the film that "inspired" John Hinckley Jr. to shoot Ronald Reagan. I've always found that to be quite disturbing on many levels. The most disturbing of which is that I could see shooting some Russian higher-ups to get Bond girls to like you, but going after the president for 13-year-old Jodie Foster? Gross. The film also made quite an impact when it came out due to its fairly extreme violence and non-heroic/disturbing protagonist. Because of these things it was one of the pioneer films for anti-heroes. Even though Dirty Harry was the first, and one of the best, he still comes off as fairly heroic. I'll talk about that more in my 1971 write-up. Travis Bickle was a pioneer not for guys like The Punisher and Jack Bauer, but for guys like Vic Mackey and Dexter Morgan (from The Shield and Dexter, respectively). We're talking about guys you cheer for even though you know you really, really shouldn't. Bickle was a man scarred by the war to such an extent that he couldn't connect with other human beings anymore. After forcing himself to view people as things in the war, he couldn't come back from that. And so a young girl that can only be helped (in his mind) by a killing machine was the perfect way for him to feel human again. It's all played as far more disturbing than that, but that's the gist. Here is yet another film that in another year might have netted itself the Oscar. Although I think both it and Network were a little too "out there" to win, I find it interesting that in some ways they're not "out there" enough to win today. Maybe in the 80s...we all know that decade of nominees needed them.
And after all of that build-up we are brought to this year's winner: Rocky. I've seen this movie SO many times because I was quasi-obsessed with the series when I was like 13 or 14. Today people might think of it as the stereotypical sports movie, but it was really the first of its kind in a lot of ways. Basically every sports movie that comes out is still compared to it. And after several years of nominees and winners that were mostly depressing (excellent, but depressing) I think the Academy wanted to restore some hope. And I can respect that, especially since it made the movie much like its titular hero: Rocky Balboa. There's been a lot of interesting analysis about the film in recent years, including that it's representative of the white man trying to rise to prominence in an age dominated by female and minority heroes (in real life, not the movies). This is of course exemplified by the fact that the main "antagonist" of the film is a black man: Apollo Creed. While this is interesting, Stallone wrote this movie over the course of merely a few days and Carl Weathers got the job because Stallone liked his attitude during an audition. So basically all of that analysis is crap. In that it wasn't the intended message, but I do find it interesting. And it's possible that those ideas were in the back of Stallone's mind. It's also possible the producers thought of it. So let's roll with that for a second: during the 60s and 70s there were plenty of people like Rocky who were struggling just as much as anybody but who were also villainized by society because that was when the idea of "the evil white man" was coming into prominence. And so the point of the film, whether you look at it that way or simply as an underdog story (for the record, I just view it as an underdog story but I thought it would be fun to share), is that the man who thought he was worthless proves that he is worth something. Not necessarily that he was the best (not until part 2 anyway) but that he was better than people thought he was. I think that's extraordinary, especially in today's society of: "if I'm not number 1 and if I don't get a nice shiny medal then I'm no good." Rocky sums it all up himself better than I could in the much overlooked and underrated sixth film, Rocky Balboa: "it ain't about how hard you hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." And that's a good lesson for anybody. But it's better learned if you just watch the first one, the other ones are more fun than philosophical. Also of note: Burgess Meredith's fantastic performance as Rocky's trainer Mickey and of course the iconic "Gonna Fly Now" music by Bill Conti. If you haven't seen the movie, there's something wrong with you. Seriously.
Isn't the 70s shaping up to be better than the 80s? I am once again correct, not that anyone should be surprised. It'll probably take me a bit longer to crank out 1975 because one of the movies is about 3 hours long and even though it's a Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket taught me that that's not quite as reliable as a Scorsese of Coppola film. But anyway, all I can say about the next year for now is that it'll include more country music, more iconic John Williams music, and the musical tones of Al Pacino firing weaponry.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
1977: The Year that The Neurotic Hypochondriac Beat the Insurrectionary Wookie
I've decided that all of my titles should be turned into really bad 70s and 80s television. Preferably they would all be spin-offs of Happy Days. On a side note, I find it ridiculous that one of those spin-offs is Mork and Mindy. How can a non sci-fi show all of a sudden decide to have an alien storyline just to fuel another show? And did you know the infamous "jump the shark" episode was in season 5 and it went on for another six seasons? Almost all of Joss Whedon's shows get canceled prematurely though. That's not cool. All of this is somewhat relevant because I find these things out when I'm surfing Wikipedia during times when I'm bored watching a nominee for the escapade. And I was driven to this by 3 films from 1977. So yeah, it's gonna be one of those. BUT, there's good stuff as well. Including my aforementioned epitome of childhood. I don't think I used the word "epitome" before but I should have.
But first we have to deal with The Goodbye Girl. If I was one of those "I think I'm snarky and clever but I'm not" reviewers I'd say: "the producers should have said goodbye to this script!" or "viewers should say goodbye to this film!" That's probably because they're trying to be succinct and polite, and I of course believe in being neither of those. Although I do find Richard Dreyfuss' performance to be entertaining, it's not enough to save the film. Because he's playing off of Marsha Mason who is really quite terrible. I often talk about performances being overrated or not being as good as other performances or whatever but she is really, truly bad. Throughout the whole movie I felt like I was watching the screen test for Dreyfuss who was acting wonderfully even against the casting director's terrible intern who would need narcotic assistance to be believable. I looked up some old reviews of the film and apparently many, including Roger Ebert, felt the same way (albeit in a more dignified fashion). However, I also really didn't care for the script too much. The overall plot is your generic "people who hate each other who learn to love each other" drivel, which can be saved by some good dialogue. But I really didn't like the dialogue. At all. Part of this was the delivery, because a lot of humor is only good in the delivery. Most of the lines on modern comedies like The Office and Community aren't that funny on the page but in their delivery they're hilarious. In this case, the lines themselves are cheesy. But humor was different back then, as it was a time when the more "traditional sitcom" flourished. Not that it doesn't still flourish today in terms of ratings, but there are also plenty of non-traditional sitcoms that never would have aired back then. So okay, the lines themselves are cheesy but they can still work with a good delivery. Dreyfuss achieves this some of the time, but even he screws up in the same way Marsha does with basically every line (and I blame the director who I also believe was the writer). And that common screw-up is hard to define but the closest I can define it is: they're waiting for people to laugh. They deliver a snappy and clever line (or they wish it was snappy and clever) and then they stand there with their heads down for a second or two as though waiting for the off-camera A.D. to give them the cue of when to start again. This would be okay on stage, when there is actual laughter, and I'm sure it was less noticeable in a theater where there was actual laughter. But comedies should always have jokes you missed the first time around because you were laughing. That's natural comedy. This script is the type of junk that would come from a formula: "insert joke here. (pause) Put line in that illustrates emotional conflict. (pause for reflection) Justify serious moment with another snappy zinger." I've gone on a bit much with this one, I guess because I just really hate bad comedy. Even more: I hate when people like bad comedy. It's why there were 6 more seasons of the Fonz than there should've been and not nearly enough Arrested Development.
A movie that's bad for a completely different reason is Julia. It's shocking to me how similar Roger Ebert's thoughts on some of these movies are to my own. Does this mean I've seen almost as many films as he has and have ergo gained a similar heavily-critical view on them? It's entirely possible. I hope his viewings came with a social life though, it would've been a lot tougher to spend time alone in the 70s since Instant Watch Netflix didn't exist. Anyway, what he said about the film is that it tries to make it about both women and thus it becomes about neither of them. The two women I'm talking about are the title character Julia (based on a real person) who fought against the Nazis (in an espionage kind of way) and her childhood friend Lillian. Julia's story is interesting, but we only experience it from the non-interesting perspective of Lillian. This could be interesting but the way it's delivered is really sloppy. Plus, Jane Fonda is the non-interesting character and she annoys me enough already. Vanessa Redgrave does a good job as Julia, although I wouldn't say she was in the movie enough to warrant the Oscar she received. Now, a movie about an ordinary woman who fights the Nazis with espionage that stars Vanessa Redgrave in more than 12 minutes of footage? I'd like that movie. A movie where Dashiell Hammett is an uninteresting drunken hippie who's also not in it enough to warrant the Oscar that the actor received, which also features Jane Fonda being her screechy self? That's not particularly good. I'm sure the book was far more interesting, and I also find myself wondering if this was a precursor to Prince of Tides syndrome where they change the story so that the more famous actress gets more screen time. Although I guess in Streisand's case it was: "the bigger producer who sees herself as a big star." So I should've used a different example. From now on I'll use Fonda as the example, so there. The point being that the film could have been interesting, could have been enthralling, and could have even been moving. But instead it's just kind of boring. I like to think that the modern filmmaker would rather use Vanessa Redgrave more, the far superior actress, but since Megan Fox continues to be in movies that don't have titles like "Drilling Miss Daisy" I'd say that maybe Hollywood has remained the same.
And on that note of adult cynicism, let's talk about the reason I love movies: Star Wars. Hell. To. The. Yeah. First off, this is the one and only time I will refer to it in this way and not as Episode IV: A New Hope. I could get into the long saga of why all of that went down the way it did, but the fact remains that when it was nominated it didn't have that part of the title. Anyway, this was the last time that a true sci-fi film was nominated for Best Picture until very recently (literally last year). In many ways it's still the standard that all other sci-fi is held up against, and for good reason. Just yesterday I was reading a retrospective of the first HP movie and how it had a similar task that George Lucas had with this movie. It has to show you a bunch of ridiculous nonsense and make you say, "I buy that" and then "I buy that and it is awesome." If this was any other movie, I'd probably complain about some of the acting. But what people fail to realize about all six films in the saga is that they're not about the acting or the dialogue. Much like the old movie serials on which they are based, it's all about the scope. The sweeping musical score (John Williams' best, which was rightfully called the greatest film music of all time by the AFI. The one time we've agreed), the operatic quality of the battles, and the envelopment of the story itself. Although the films are not devoid of interesting moral, political, and religious issues that I won't get into (because I wouldn't stop typing for 20 paragraphs or so) they largely function as being straight-up enjoyable for people of all ages. And there's something wonderful about that. Because filmmaking itself doesn't always have to be about being artsy or thought-provoking, sometimes we recognize a filmmaker's talent for bringing a world to life and transporting the audience to another realm for a mere few hours. Not many directors or writers have actually achieved this (for me it's really just Lucas, Peter Jackson, and the creators of Lost) but when they do it is magical. I won't even bother describing the plot because if you haven't seen it then there is something missing from your life. Although interestingly: George Lucas, and myself, put this film at the bottom of the saga in many ways. Not because it's bad, it's fantastic, but because once you know the world then the first half-hour of introducing the world isn't as meaningful. The film also introduces Darth Vader, who some may recall was my top-ranked villain of all time, and though his true emotional impact on the story comes in later movies there is simply no comparison to his "I find your lack of faith: disturbing" scene. Films like this never win any of the big awards of course, but that's okay. George Lucas hates Hollywood anyway. I could also go on about his business genius but I won't. I simply love the series too much, and thus have too much to say about it. So I'll just end by saying that perhaps the Academy was a lot better back then. A lot of the movies I personally dislike were popular at the time, so I respect them for nominating films that people had actually seen. And even though Lucas' space opera never stood a chance at winning, at least they didn't totally snub him like they recently did with Nolan (and will probably do again this year). And even the AFI knows some of the greatest music ever written when they hear it.
I considered just writing about George Lucas' whole saga for this entire blog entry and then summing up the other 3 non-winners with "they weren't very good" but I decided against it, and so I shall talk about The Turning Point. I figure that if I start cutting corners then soon I'll stop watching the films in their entirety and then that means that the time I've spent watching a lot of it was time wasted. And I hate wastes of time. So I'd rather waste another 50 years worth of time on some more movies I might not like, just in the off chance that some of them are excellent (which some will be) and so I can say that I did. This film is probably one I'll have trouble recalling things about in the weeks to come (or possibly even hours) but not because it's bad just because I don't find it personally interesting. Something interesting that I've neglected to mention before is that all of a person's life experiences alter how they view films. And they can't really view them any other way. That's why you can tell a lot about a person based on what they watch, and especially what they re-watch. There are likely many films I've reviewed that I saw as bad because I couldn't see them any other way. Someone else might have had different experiences which would cause them to like it. There are, of course, exceptions on both sides because no one should like Gigli and everyone should like Iron Man. But, after all of that blathering, this particular movie fits into the category of "well-done but not compelling for me." I empathize with a lot of the themes of the film: missing out on one's true potential, being sabotaged not by bad decisions but by life itself, etc. Because most people can recognize with those issues, but the overall pull of the movie is kind of a mid-life crisis thing with an added element of vicariously living through one's children. As 22 hasn't been "mid-life" since the 1800s and I certainly don't have any kids, I really can't fully become emotionally attached to this movie. Also, I'm not a female. Just saying. But its storyline of the ballerina who missed out on her big break when she became pregnant is well-delivered, well-acted, and contains some great classical music. I'm not a big ballet person, as I probably proved by not knowing a more dignified word than "ballerina." By comparison it's probably like the feeling I get when people call a graphic novel a comic book (Archie is a comic book, "The Dark Knight Returns" is novel-quality fiction with pictures). But I don't know any better in this instance. One thing that did annoy me about the film is that before a lot of the ballet performances the credits for the classical piece were put up on the screen. If they had projected it on the back wall of the stage, thus making the credits exist in the movie, that wouldn't have taken the viewer out quite as much and would've achieved the same goal (which was probably legally-based). And who knows? Maybe the filmmakers wanted to do that but couldn't. Anyway, I'd recommend any moms with daughters to watch the film and I guess any moms in general. For me: it was meh. But I still respect what they accomplished.
On the complete flip-side of things, this year's winner hits a little bit too close to home: Annie Hall. Comedies rarely win, and only one since then has won, Shakespeare in Love, and I wouldn't consider it a real comedy anyway. If Woody Allen was dead, I'd think I was the reincarnation of him. As he is not, I think we were both cursed by the same shaman. Because his misadventures with women, social gatherings, and life in general are all too familiar. I mean, not really. I can't say as I've ever embarrassed my girlfriend by sneezing into cocaine (I know, I know. I haven't truly lived). And in reality, Woody Allen's misadventures dwarf everyone else's. That's why people like him: you feel a lot better about your life when his movie is over. This is easily his masterpiece. Its narrative style in particular is outstanding. It has a "stream of consciousness" style that makes it so grounded and real because it evokes memory itself. He's reflecting on things that happened to him and showing it to us in ways that we remember our own lives. So everything feels so real even though it's totally over-the-top. But isn't life over-the-top a lot? Mine is. And the beginning of the movie focuses on Woody talking about how everyone in his grade school classes annoyed him because he felt he was ahead of them in many ways. As this closely mirrors the beginning of my forthcoming autobiography, I'd like to go on the record and say that you can check when my Word document was created and my Netflix history to see that I did, in fact, start the book before I saw the movie. I'm sure Woody would enjoy and empathize with my book enough that he'd ignore the similarities anyway. And then endorse the book and make it huge. Note to self: create more parallels to Annie Hall in memoirs. Anyway, want to hear what actually snappy dialogue sounds like? Watch this movie. It was SO ahead of its time in the way that it structures its comedy. Along with Mel Brooks, he really ushered in the era of modern comedy. I'm not kidding when I say that Young Frankenstein should have won for Screenplay and been nominated for Picture, it is truly brilliant. And whereas Brooks usually spoofs and references things, Allen basically makes movies that can be viewed as behind-the-scenes footage of his stand-up routines. I usually dislike when comedies are nominated, because they're usually no good. If more comedies were like this then not only would I endorse their nomination, but their wins as well (depending on what they're up against of course). By means of a plot: neurotic guy seems charming to woman, woman finds his neurotic nature annoying after a while, and they break up. The story is largely irrelevant, because it's Allen's views on what happens and the mini-vignettes that make the movie. The part where Allen is in line for a movie while standing nearby an obnoxiously loud movie-goer was especially great, and it illustrates why I usually wait for the DVD nowadays.
Way back in the 7th grade I got all mad when I found out that some comedy beat out one of my personal favorites for Best Picture. But now I understand why, and I also recognize that some movies are better when they exist outside of the Academy. It makes them cooler in the same way that minor forms of rebellion are cool in a "it's cliché and stupid to rebel against the establishment but everyone still likes it anyway even if they don't admit it" kind of way. And what's this? Next year is even better? Not in the sense that it epitomizes my childhood, but it might epitomize my pre-teen years. I haven't quite finished it yet but I know it will include the precursor to the Internet meme, superfluous social commentary, and the little-seen and much-overlooked foil to the Western: the "Eastern."
But first we have to deal with The Goodbye Girl. If I was one of those "I think I'm snarky and clever but I'm not" reviewers I'd say: "the producers should have said goodbye to this script!" or "viewers should say goodbye to this film!" That's probably because they're trying to be succinct and polite, and I of course believe in being neither of those. Although I do find Richard Dreyfuss' performance to be entertaining, it's not enough to save the film. Because he's playing off of Marsha Mason who is really quite terrible. I often talk about performances being overrated or not being as good as other performances or whatever but she is really, truly bad. Throughout the whole movie I felt like I was watching the screen test for Dreyfuss who was acting wonderfully even against the casting director's terrible intern who would need narcotic assistance to be believable. I looked up some old reviews of the film and apparently many, including Roger Ebert, felt the same way (albeit in a more dignified fashion). However, I also really didn't care for the script too much. The overall plot is your generic "people who hate each other who learn to love each other" drivel, which can be saved by some good dialogue. But I really didn't like the dialogue. At all. Part of this was the delivery, because a lot of humor is only good in the delivery. Most of the lines on modern comedies like The Office and Community aren't that funny on the page but in their delivery they're hilarious. In this case, the lines themselves are cheesy. But humor was different back then, as it was a time when the more "traditional sitcom" flourished. Not that it doesn't still flourish today in terms of ratings, but there are also plenty of non-traditional sitcoms that never would have aired back then. So okay, the lines themselves are cheesy but they can still work with a good delivery. Dreyfuss achieves this some of the time, but even he screws up in the same way Marsha does with basically every line (and I blame the director who I also believe was the writer). And that common screw-up is hard to define but the closest I can define it is: they're waiting for people to laugh. They deliver a snappy and clever line (or they wish it was snappy and clever) and then they stand there with their heads down for a second or two as though waiting for the off-camera A.D. to give them the cue of when to start again. This would be okay on stage, when there is actual laughter, and I'm sure it was less noticeable in a theater where there was actual laughter. But comedies should always have jokes you missed the first time around because you were laughing. That's natural comedy. This script is the type of junk that would come from a formula: "insert joke here. (pause) Put line in that illustrates emotional conflict. (pause for reflection) Justify serious moment with another snappy zinger." I've gone on a bit much with this one, I guess because I just really hate bad comedy. Even more: I hate when people like bad comedy. It's why there were 6 more seasons of the Fonz than there should've been and not nearly enough Arrested Development.
A movie that's bad for a completely different reason is Julia. It's shocking to me how similar Roger Ebert's thoughts on some of these movies are to my own. Does this mean I've seen almost as many films as he has and have ergo gained a similar heavily-critical view on them? It's entirely possible. I hope his viewings came with a social life though, it would've been a lot tougher to spend time alone in the 70s since Instant Watch Netflix didn't exist. Anyway, what he said about the film is that it tries to make it about both women and thus it becomes about neither of them. The two women I'm talking about are the title character Julia (based on a real person) who fought against the Nazis (in an espionage kind of way) and her childhood friend Lillian. Julia's story is interesting, but we only experience it from the non-interesting perspective of Lillian. This could be interesting but the way it's delivered is really sloppy. Plus, Jane Fonda is the non-interesting character and she annoys me enough already. Vanessa Redgrave does a good job as Julia, although I wouldn't say she was in the movie enough to warrant the Oscar she received. Now, a movie about an ordinary woman who fights the Nazis with espionage that stars Vanessa Redgrave in more than 12 minutes of footage? I'd like that movie. A movie where Dashiell Hammett is an uninteresting drunken hippie who's also not in it enough to warrant the Oscar that the actor received, which also features Jane Fonda being her screechy self? That's not particularly good. I'm sure the book was far more interesting, and I also find myself wondering if this was a precursor to Prince of Tides syndrome where they change the story so that the more famous actress gets more screen time. Although I guess in Streisand's case it was: "the bigger producer who sees herself as a big star." So I should've used a different example. From now on I'll use Fonda as the example, so there. The point being that the film could have been interesting, could have been enthralling, and could have even been moving. But instead it's just kind of boring. I like to think that the modern filmmaker would rather use Vanessa Redgrave more, the far superior actress, but since Megan Fox continues to be in movies that don't have titles like "Drilling Miss Daisy" I'd say that maybe Hollywood has remained the same.
And on that note of adult cynicism, let's talk about the reason I love movies: Star Wars. Hell. To. The. Yeah. First off, this is the one and only time I will refer to it in this way and not as Episode IV: A New Hope. I could get into the long saga of why all of that went down the way it did, but the fact remains that when it was nominated it didn't have that part of the title. Anyway, this was the last time that a true sci-fi film was nominated for Best Picture until very recently (literally last year). In many ways it's still the standard that all other sci-fi is held up against, and for good reason. Just yesterday I was reading a retrospective of the first HP movie and how it had a similar task that George Lucas had with this movie. It has to show you a bunch of ridiculous nonsense and make you say, "I buy that" and then "I buy that and it is awesome." If this was any other movie, I'd probably complain about some of the acting. But what people fail to realize about all six films in the saga is that they're not about the acting or the dialogue. Much like the old movie serials on which they are based, it's all about the scope. The sweeping musical score (John Williams' best, which was rightfully called the greatest film music of all time by the AFI. The one time we've agreed), the operatic quality of the battles, and the envelopment of the story itself. Although the films are not devoid of interesting moral, political, and religious issues that I won't get into (because I wouldn't stop typing for 20 paragraphs or so) they largely function as being straight-up enjoyable for people of all ages. And there's something wonderful about that. Because filmmaking itself doesn't always have to be about being artsy or thought-provoking, sometimes we recognize a filmmaker's talent for bringing a world to life and transporting the audience to another realm for a mere few hours. Not many directors or writers have actually achieved this (for me it's really just Lucas, Peter Jackson, and the creators of Lost) but when they do it is magical. I won't even bother describing the plot because if you haven't seen it then there is something missing from your life. Although interestingly: George Lucas, and myself, put this film at the bottom of the saga in many ways. Not because it's bad, it's fantastic, but because once you know the world then the first half-hour of introducing the world isn't as meaningful. The film also introduces Darth Vader, who some may recall was my top-ranked villain of all time, and though his true emotional impact on the story comes in later movies there is simply no comparison to his "I find your lack of faith: disturbing" scene. Films like this never win any of the big awards of course, but that's okay. George Lucas hates Hollywood anyway. I could also go on about his business genius but I won't. I simply love the series too much, and thus have too much to say about it. So I'll just end by saying that perhaps the Academy was a lot better back then. A lot of the movies I personally dislike were popular at the time, so I respect them for nominating films that people had actually seen. And even though Lucas' space opera never stood a chance at winning, at least they didn't totally snub him like they recently did with Nolan (and will probably do again this year). And even the AFI knows some of the greatest music ever written when they hear it.
I considered just writing about George Lucas' whole saga for this entire blog entry and then summing up the other 3 non-winners with "they weren't very good" but I decided against it, and so I shall talk about The Turning Point. I figure that if I start cutting corners then soon I'll stop watching the films in their entirety and then that means that the time I've spent watching a lot of it was time wasted. And I hate wastes of time. So I'd rather waste another 50 years worth of time on some more movies I might not like, just in the off chance that some of them are excellent (which some will be) and so I can say that I did. This film is probably one I'll have trouble recalling things about in the weeks to come (or possibly even hours) but not because it's bad just because I don't find it personally interesting. Something interesting that I've neglected to mention before is that all of a person's life experiences alter how they view films. And they can't really view them any other way. That's why you can tell a lot about a person based on what they watch, and especially what they re-watch. There are likely many films I've reviewed that I saw as bad because I couldn't see them any other way. Someone else might have had different experiences which would cause them to like it. There are, of course, exceptions on both sides because no one should like Gigli and everyone should like Iron Man. But, after all of that blathering, this particular movie fits into the category of "well-done but not compelling for me." I empathize with a lot of the themes of the film: missing out on one's true potential, being sabotaged not by bad decisions but by life itself, etc. Because most people can recognize with those issues, but the overall pull of the movie is kind of a mid-life crisis thing with an added element of vicariously living through one's children. As 22 hasn't been "mid-life" since the 1800s and I certainly don't have any kids, I really can't fully become emotionally attached to this movie. Also, I'm not a female. Just saying. But its storyline of the ballerina who missed out on her big break when she became pregnant is well-delivered, well-acted, and contains some great classical music. I'm not a big ballet person, as I probably proved by not knowing a more dignified word than "ballerina." By comparison it's probably like the feeling I get when people call a graphic novel a comic book (Archie is a comic book, "The Dark Knight Returns" is novel-quality fiction with pictures). But I don't know any better in this instance. One thing that did annoy me about the film is that before a lot of the ballet performances the credits for the classical piece were put up on the screen. If they had projected it on the back wall of the stage, thus making the credits exist in the movie, that wouldn't have taken the viewer out quite as much and would've achieved the same goal (which was probably legally-based). And who knows? Maybe the filmmakers wanted to do that but couldn't. Anyway, I'd recommend any moms with daughters to watch the film and I guess any moms in general. For me: it was meh. But I still respect what they accomplished.
On the complete flip-side of things, this year's winner hits a little bit too close to home: Annie Hall. Comedies rarely win, and only one since then has won, Shakespeare in Love, and I wouldn't consider it a real comedy anyway. If Woody Allen was dead, I'd think I was the reincarnation of him. As he is not, I think we were both cursed by the same shaman. Because his misadventures with women, social gatherings, and life in general are all too familiar. I mean, not really. I can't say as I've ever embarrassed my girlfriend by sneezing into cocaine (I know, I know. I haven't truly lived). And in reality, Woody Allen's misadventures dwarf everyone else's. That's why people like him: you feel a lot better about your life when his movie is over. This is easily his masterpiece. Its narrative style in particular is outstanding. It has a "stream of consciousness" style that makes it so grounded and real because it evokes memory itself. He's reflecting on things that happened to him and showing it to us in ways that we remember our own lives. So everything feels so real even though it's totally over-the-top. But isn't life over-the-top a lot? Mine is. And the beginning of the movie focuses on Woody talking about how everyone in his grade school classes annoyed him because he felt he was ahead of them in many ways. As this closely mirrors the beginning of my forthcoming autobiography, I'd like to go on the record and say that you can check when my Word document was created and my Netflix history to see that I did, in fact, start the book before I saw the movie. I'm sure Woody would enjoy and empathize with my book enough that he'd ignore the similarities anyway. And then endorse the book and make it huge. Note to self: create more parallels to Annie Hall in memoirs. Anyway, want to hear what actually snappy dialogue sounds like? Watch this movie. It was SO ahead of its time in the way that it structures its comedy. Along with Mel Brooks, he really ushered in the era of modern comedy. I'm not kidding when I say that Young Frankenstein should have won for Screenplay and been nominated for Picture, it is truly brilliant. And whereas Brooks usually spoofs and references things, Allen basically makes movies that can be viewed as behind-the-scenes footage of his stand-up routines. I usually dislike when comedies are nominated, because they're usually no good. If more comedies were like this then not only would I endorse their nomination, but their wins as well (depending on what they're up against of course). By means of a plot: neurotic guy seems charming to woman, woman finds his neurotic nature annoying after a while, and they break up. The story is largely irrelevant, because it's Allen's views on what happens and the mini-vignettes that make the movie. The part where Allen is in line for a movie while standing nearby an obnoxiously loud movie-goer was especially great, and it illustrates why I usually wait for the DVD nowadays.
Way back in the 7th grade I got all mad when I found out that some comedy beat out one of my personal favorites for Best Picture. But now I understand why, and I also recognize that some movies are better when they exist outside of the Academy. It makes them cooler in the same way that minor forms of rebellion are cool in a "it's cliché and stupid to rebel against the establishment but everyone still likes it anyway even if they don't admit it" kind of way. And what's this? Next year is even better? Not in the sense that it epitomizes my childhood, but it might epitomize my pre-teen years. I haven't quite finished it yet but I know it will include the precursor to the Internet meme, superfluous social commentary, and the little-seen and much-overlooked foil to the Western: the "Eastern."
Friday, November 12, 2010
1978: The Year that My Criticism Was Poorly Timed and Oliver Stone Was Reverse-Upstaged
My title will be explained eventually, let's just say I'll be trodding some sensitive grounds due to recent events. Intrigued yet? It's really not that interesting, but I haven't decided yet whether I'll be taking the blatant Family Guy route or if I'm going to tiptoe through the tulips at the risk of not sharing my true opinion. Either way, my apologies for taking so long to crank out this blog. I realized that unemployment is a lot less depressing when you're teaming up with anthropomorphized animal polygons to fight a bunch of Disney villains on the PS2. Which is my long-winded and slightly douchey way of saying, "I've been playing video games and not watching Oscar nominees." But now I'm back, and so we shall get to it. Except that I should also mention that in my last post I mentioned the book that inspired my blog title! Holy crap! I love in books when the book title shows up. Okay, I'm done now.
This first movie turned out to be better and less whiny than I expected: Coming Home. Since it's about a Vietnam vet who loses the ability to walk and has to return home to be treated like crap, I was expecting the usual fare. I was expecting more of a Born on the Fourth of July type thing, which as you may recall from my 1989 post: I did not like. It's also based on the same book, so it's funny that in the Oliver Stone version the vet is consumed with protesting loudly and comparing dead baby counts and in this movie he becomes a quiet romantic. So...which one actually happened? Was it the "I had a passionate love scene with Jane Fonda and then became a better person" version or the "I had a shouting match with Willem Dafoe and disgraced the music of John Williams" version? I prefer the first, but not because of the Jane Fonda part. I find her annoying. But Jon Voight is oddly compelling in this film. He manages to show the audience the pain that was felt by many of our Vietnam vets without being too blatant or preachy about it and then he shows us a truly human side as well. Here I was expecting to write in my blog: "well this film teaches us that if you treat your nurse like crap then she'll eventually love you" as the newest installment in my continuing frustrations with sadly accurate film romances that involve a jerk and a perfectly nice woman. Thankfully, this didn't go that route. Voight's character shows some real warmth and in the few scenes in the movie where he is protesting, he doesn't go in the Cruise/Stone direction by saying: "here's a logical argument, I am in a wheelchair and should ergo be heard." Instead, Voight comes across as very soft-spoken and opposes the war from a human point of view instead of a political one. This engages the viewer instead of polarizing them. Don't let my optimism fool you, aside from Voight's performance this movie is fairly ordinary. But since it's better than the other movies of its type that I've seen, I give it credit. And anytime Oliver Stone gets upstaged, it's a good time. Of course, this movie came out 11 years before his version and so he's only upstaged when you watch them the way I have been watching them...hence yet another invented phrase of mine: "reverse upstaged." I wish I had come up with it sooner.
This next movie can only be described as "cute:" Heaven Can Wait. I guess in a year of 2 dreary Vietnam movies and a brutal prison escape movie, maybe they wanted to lighten things up a bit with a fun comedy. And this movie is definitely fun. Literally nothing more than that. It's about a football player who dies before his time and is thus sent back in another man's body. I think I laughed out loud a grand total of about 2 times during the whole movie, but it was still enjoyable. And it's predictable with the love story and the football aspect of course remains relevant and yadda yadda. Even on the level of charming comedy film it still could've done a few things a bit better, such as showing us a bit more often the actual body that he was inhabiting. Because we just see him as Warren Beatty the whole time (if they showed the old guy whose body he ended up in, they didn't do it enough because I don't remember seeing it). And why is it important to do this? Because it helps us connect with some of the more absurd concepts: the old guy is married to a way younger woman, the old guy becomes a quarterback, etc. The first one would be especially important to establish because the older the guy is the funnier the relationship is. Having seen ye olde "body switch" episode on basically every sci-fi show ever, I know it's important to keep reinforcing the whole idea (such as seeing an old guy in the mirror as Warren Beatty stands before it). Plus, who doesn't love a good sight gag? My point is this: I wouldn't nitpick about stuff like that with a movie of this type, but when it's nominated for Best Picture then it better pull off ye olde body switch better than at least most movies/shows. It better revolutionize the gimmick. Know what's wrong with Bruce Almighty? Nothing that really comes to mind, it's pretty funny and has a surprising amount of heart. Know what would be wrong with it if for unknown reasons it was nominated for Best Picture? Many, many things. Everything is different when viewed through an Oscar lens, and I hope that also explains some of my many tirades. Anyway, as I said, this movie is cute and I enjoyed it but that's about all.
And speaking of Oliver Stone, he wrote this next movie: Midnight Express. I know I wasn't actually just speaking about him but a paragraph back is a small enough distance to warrant me saying that right? I think so. I had mixed feelings about this movie, but instead of the usual mixed feelings phenomenon of "I love aspects of it and hate others" (like Avatar) it was more of an "I somewhat neutrally dislike aspects of this film and mildly appreciate other aspects of it" (like...Mexican food?). Actually, the only aspect I dislike is the main character. Although you grow to like him as the movie progresses, and I give the actor credit for that, in the beginning he's a schmuck. Because anybody who tries to smuggle drugs into a country like Turkey is a moron. There are plenty of illegal activities you can do in the United States if that's your thing. But there are a lot of countries in the Middle East where they do terrible terrible things to drug runners. And why was he running the drugs? For the money. And the money is for...what now? No idea. New car I guess. It's based on a true story so I hope in real life his dog needed an experimental back surgery and the only way he could pay for the surgery was with copious amounts of unmarked bills. That, coupled with the fact that it was written by Oliver Stone, led me to think that maybe it was going to be a "we're almost as bad as that country and we should make all drugs legal" thing. If someone wants to make a movie exploring the pros and cons of various drug arguments, fine. But using a man's personal story? That's bad. So it's thankful that that's not what the film ended up doing. Instead, we see a frat boy turn into a better man by realizing all of the things he was missing. So this made his lackluster decision to smuggle drugs more plausible and more interesting. He was one of those "I'm bored so I break the rules" type guys who then became a better man in prison. Moral of the story: don't be a douche and you can avoid being beaten, stabbed, and attempted-raped in prison. It was also good to see John Hurt as always, even in a supporting role, and the other roles were solid as well. Overall, the film was well-done but not overly fantastic. It beats pretty much most of the 80s nominees, but the 70s seems to be a whole new playing field and the bar has been raised.
And now, here comes some possible controversy with: An Unmarried Woman. I was all set to rant and rave about this movie. But sadly, the female lead in the movie died last week. And in case you're having trouble interpreting my often sarcastic writing style, I am saying that it's sad that she died and not that my rant was ruined. There will be other rants, other movies. It sounds like she was a down-to-Earth actress who people enjoyed working with. I haven't seen any of her other work, but her performance in this movie is solid and quite honestly (not just saying this because she died) I think its faults are with the writing and not her performance. She played the character well but the character was annoying. This was yet another in a string of 70s films that went along with the sexual revolution, but here's something I find amusing: why are they all written by men? All of these movies have the same claim to fame: portraying women in an empowering way. So why would a man know anything about an empowered woman? All they basically do is write male characters and give them breasts. In this movie the woman's husband cheats on her and so she leaves him and then tries to have some random loveless hookups with random guys, ends up falling for one of them, so on and so forth. She ends up not being with him for whatever superfluous melodramatic reason that I forget. But allow me to outline the plot if it had a male lead: dude's wife cheats on him and he becomes a notorious Casanova. He's a lovable rogue but ultimately a jerk since he objectifies women (so they can't hurt him) until he meets the woman that gives the crap right back to him and ultimately shows him that it's okay to love and blah blah blah. I know what you're thinking: "but Domenic, didn't you just say that they wrote a male character with breasts? So wouldn't what you just described be the same as this movie's plot?" Nope! And here's why: audiences wouldn't want a movie with a lovable female rogue because women would say she's a tramp and men would find her intimidating. Instead, this movie has a female lead that basically bumbles through her various romantic encounters. That way, women can laugh at her and say "haha I've been there!" or "what a klutz!" and men can say "boy, I'm not threatened at all by her and I am in no way emasculated as I view this film!" Isn't the study of culture grand? Well anyway, since I had to talk about societal things that I find interesting which only somewhat apply to the film, that will tell you that there's not much there. And like most movies of its type, it's a bit too long. But Jill Clayburgh: she seemed like a nice lady and a solid actress. I'll have to check out more of her work, and not just so I'll feel less guilty about bashing her movie.
And this brings us to this year's excellent winner: The Deer Hunter. I saw this several years ago, but it stuck with me so much that I felt I didn't have to view it again. That's a good thing. Also, it's like 3 hours long and even I won't sit through that much movie again unless I feel I need to in order to pick up on something I missed. Remember when I said that Apocalypse Now was the best Vietnam movie because it was more of a humanity movie? Well this is a straight-up Vietnam movie and in that category there is no better film. Because it doesn't exist solely to say that the war was bad. Everyone already knows that anyway, and even if they didn't you can pick that up from the movie. The characters are the focal point of the film and that's the way it should be. DeNiro and Walken lead the excellent ensemble cast and Meryl Streep is there too in an early role of hers that is way less annoying than usual. The film centers around several friends who all go off to fight in Vietnam and how their lives change because of the war. And though the film is long, it portions its sections so well. It roughly evens out to: the first hour is spent getting to know the characters how they were, the second hour is Vietnam, and the third hour is seeing how the characters changed. Remember that LXG/On Golden Pond moment I mentioned in 1981? And yes, I realize I'm the first and last person to pair those movies together. Well as my mother quite accurately pointed out to me: another excellent example of that dynamic comes in the most important scene in this film. Early in the film, we see DeNiro hunting deer in a fairly nonchalant manner (get it? That's where the film title is from!). But then during the big scene, he can't bring himself to kill a deer because the war has changed him. And oddly enough, it was for the better. He grew to appreciate life after his harrowing experiences and who was he to take away the life of an innocent creature when he himself had been spared? Sadly, Christopher Walken goes the other way after the war. In the beginning he was a happy patriot giggling in the happy aftermath of a wedding with friends (I believe it was his wedding but I forget, and I didn't feel like just rewatching that part). The point is that by the time it's the end of the movie, with the famous Russian Roulette scene, we see quite plainly the terrible personal costs of the war. Quite honestly, and Apocalypse Now was already filming when this was released so it doesn't count, no one should have made a Vietnam movie after this movie came out. Because it did everything so well. It got its point across without being too blatant and it beautifully told a very personal story with relatable characters. It didn't whine, but it made the same points that Oliver Stone feebly tries to get across. Why Jon Voight's movie also got nominated in the same year I have no idea, because even though it was pretty good it's got nothing on this movie. So watch it on a day when you have 3 hours to spare and you feel like your life sucks, because you will probably end up feeling better about your life by comparison.
Well that's it for this year, which even though it took me a while to finish up I really quite enjoyed. I have already seen every other winner for this decade, because they're all really good and one of them is the greatest film of all time, so I hope that the nominees that I haven't seen are also of high quality. All I know for now is that the next installment will include: classic neuroticism, nazism...umm...and on a more positive note: LITERALLY THE EXEMPLIFICATION OF MY CHILDHOOD AND A BIG PART OF WHY I LOVE MOVIES AS MUCH AS I DO. So yeah you'll want to be here for that.
This first movie turned out to be better and less whiny than I expected: Coming Home. Since it's about a Vietnam vet who loses the ability to walk and has to return home to be treated like crap, I was expecting the usual fare. I was expecting more of a Born on the Fourth of July type thing, which as you may recall from my 1989 post: I did not like. It's also based on the same book, so it's funny that in the Oliver Stone version the vet is consumed with protesting loudly and comparing dead baby counts and in this movie he becomes a quiet romantic. So...which one actually happened? Was it the "I had a passionate love scene with Jane Fonda and then became a better person" version or the "I had a shouting match with Willem Dafoe and disgraced the music of John Williams" version? I prefer the first, but not because of the Jane Fonda part. I find her annoying. But Jon Voight is oddly compelling in this film. He manages to show the audience the pain that was felt by many of our Vietnam vets without being too blatant or preachy about it and then he shows us a truly human side as well. Here I was expecting to write in my blog: "well this film teaches us that if you treat your nurse like crap then she'll eventually love you" as the newest installment in my continuing frustrations with sadly accurate film romances that involve a jerk and a perfectly nice woman. Thankfully, this didn't go that route. Voight's character shows some real warmth and in the few scenes in the movie where he is protesting, he doesn't go in the Cruise/Stone direction by saying: "here's a logical argument, I am in a wheelchair and should ergo be heard." Instead, Voight comes across as very soft-spoken and opposes the war from a human point of view instead of a political one. This engages the viewer instead of polarizing them. Don't let my optimism fool you, aside from Voight's performance this movie is fairly ordinary. But since it's better than the other movies of its type that I've seen, I give it credit. And anytime Oliver Stone gets upstaged, it's a good time. Of course, this movie came out 11 years before his version and so he's only upstaged when you watch them the way I have been watching them...hence yet another invented phrase of mine: "reverse upstaged." I wish I had come up with it sooner.
This next movie can only be described as "cute:" Heaven Can Wait. I guess in a year of 2 dreary Vietnam movies and a brutal prison escape movie, maybe they wanted to lighten things up a bit with a fun comedy. And this movie is definitely fun. Literally nothing more than that. It's about a football player who dies before his time and is thus sent back in another man's body. I think I laughed out loud a grand total of about 2 times during the whole movie, but it was still enjoyable. And it's predictable with the love story and the football aspect of course remains relevant and yadda yadda. Even on the level of charming comedy film it still could've done a few things a bit better, such as showing us a bit more often the actual body that he was inhabiting. Because we just see him as Warren Beatty the whole time (if they showed the old guy whose body he ended up in, they didn't do it enough because I don't remember seeing it). And why is it important to do this? Because it helps us connect with some of the more absurd concepts: the old guy is married to a way younger woman, the old guy becomes a quarterback, etc. The first one would be especially important to establish because the older the guy is the funnier the relationship is. Having seen ye olde "body switch" episode on basically every sci-fi show ever, I know it's important to keep reinforcing the whole idea (such as seeing an old guy in the mirror as Warren Beatty stands before it). Plus, who doesn't love a good sight gag? My point is this: I wouldn't nitpick about stuff like that with a movie of this type, but when it's nominated for Best Picture then it better pull off ye olde body switch better than at least most movies/shows. It better revolutionize the gimmick. Know what's wrong with Bruce Almighty? Nothing that really comes to mind, it's pretty funny and has a surprising amount of heart. Know what would be wrong with it if for unknown reasons it was nominated for Best Picture? Many, many things. Everything is different when viewed through an Oscar lens, and I hope that also explains some of my many tirades. Anyway, as I said, this movie is cute and I enjoyed it but that's about all.
And speaking of Oliver Stone, he wrote this next movie: Midnight Express. I know I wasn't actually just speaking about him but a paragraph back is a small enough distance to warrant me saying that right? I think so. I had mixed feelings about this movie, but instead of the usual mixed feelings phenomenon of "I love aspects of it and hate others" (like Avatar) it was more of an "I somewhat neutrally dislike aspects of this film and mildly appreciate other aspects of it" (like...Mexican food?). Actually, the only aspect I dislike is the main character. Although you grow to like him as the movie progresses, and I give the actor credit for that, in the beginning he's a schmuck. Because anybody who tries to smuggle drugs into a country like Turkey is a moron. There are plenty of illegal activities you can do in the United States if that's your thing. But there are a lot of countries in the Middle East where they do terrible terrible things to drug runners. And why was he running the drugs? For the money. And the money is for...what now? No idea. New car I guess. It's based on a true story so I hope in real life his dog needed an experimental back surgery and the only way he could pay for the surgery was with copious amounts of unmarked bills. That, coupled with the fact that it was written by Oliver Stone, led me to think that maybe it was going to be a "we're almost as bad as that country and we should make all drugs legal" thing. If someone wants to make a movie exploring the pros and cons of various drug arguments, fine. But using a man's personal story? That's bad. So it's thankful that that's not what the film ended up doing. Instead, we see a frat boy turn into a better man by realizing all of the things he was missing. So this made his lackluster decision to smuggle drugs more plausible and more interesting. He was one of those "I'm bored so I break the rules" type guys who then became a better man in prison. Moral of the story: don't be a douche and you can avoid being beaten, stabbed, and attempted-raped in prison. It was also good to see John Hurt as always, even in a supporting role, and the other roles were solid as well. Overall, the film was well-done but not overly fantastic. It beats pretty much most of the 80s nominees, but the 70s seems to be a whole new playing field and the bar has been raised.
And now, here comes some possible controversy with: An Unmarried Woman. I was all set to rant and rave about this movie. But sadly, the female lead in the movie died last week. And in case you're having trouble interpreting my often sarcastic writing style, I am saying that it's sad that she died and not that my rant was ruined. There will be other rants, other movies. It sounds like she was a down-to-Earth actress who people enjoyed working with. I haven't seen any of her other work, but her performance in this movie is solid and quite honestly (not just saying this because she died) I think its faults are with the writing and not her performance. She played the character well but the character was annoying. This was yet another in a string of 70s films that went along with the sexual revolution, but here's something I find amusing: why are they all written by men? All of these movies have the same claim to fame: portraying women in an empowering way. So why would a man know anything about an empowered woman? All they basically do is write male characters and give them breasts. In this movie the woman's husband cheats on her and so she leaves him and then tries to have some random loveless hookups with random guys, ends up falling for one of them, so on and so forth. She ends up not being with him for whatever superfluous melodramatic reason that I forget. But allow me to outline the plot if it had a male lead: dude's wife cheats on him and he becomes a notorious Casanova. He's a lovable rogue but ultimately a jerk since he objectifies women (so they can't hurt him) until he meets the woman that gives the crap right back to him and ultimately shows him that it's okay to love and blah blah blah. I know what you're thinking: "but Domenic, didn't you just say that they wrote a male character with breasts? So wouldn't what you just described be the same as this movie's plot?" Nope! And here's why: audiences wouldn't want a movie with a lovable female rogue because women would say she's a tramp and men would find her intimidating. Instead, this movie has a female lead that basically bumbles through her various romantic encounters. That way, women can laugh at her and say "haha I've been there!" or "what a klutz!" and men can say "boy, I'm not threatened at all by her and I am in no way emasculated as I view this film!" Isn't the study of culture grand? Well anyway, since I had to talk about societal things that I find interesting which only somewhat apply to the film, that will tell you that there's not much there. And like most movies of its type, it's a bit too long. But Jill Clayburgh: she seemed like a nice lady and a solid actress. I'll have to check out more of her work, and not just so I'll feel less guilty about bashing her movie.
And this brings us to this year's excellent winner: The Deer Hunter. I saw this several years ago, but it stuck with me so much that I felt I didn't have to view it again. That's a good thing. Also, it's like 3 hours long and even I won't sit through that much movie again unless I feel I need to in order to pick up on something I missed. Remember when I said that Apocalypse Now was the best Vietnam movie because it was more of a humanity movie? Well this is a straight-up Vietnam movie and in that category there is no better film. Because it doesn't exist solely to say that the war was bad. Everyone already knows that anyway, and even if they didn't you can pick that up from the movie. The characters are the focal point of the film and that's the way it should be. DeNiro and Walken lead the excellent ensemble cast and Meryl Streep is there too in an early role of hers that is way less annoying than usual. The film centers around several friends who all go off to fight in Vietnam and how their lives change because of the war. And though the film is long, it portions its sections so well. It roughly evens out to: the first hour is spent getting to know the characters how they were, the second hour is Vietnam, and the third hour is seeing how the characters changed. Remember that LXG/On Golden Pond moment I mentioned in 1981? And yes, I realize I'm the first and last person to pair those movies together. Well as my mother quite accurately pointed out to me: another excellent example of that dynamic comes in the most important scene in this film. Early in the film, we see DeNiro hunting deer in a fairly nonchalant manner (get it? That's where the film title is from!). But then during the big scene, he can't bring himself to kill a deer because the war has changed him. And oddly enough, it was for the better. He grew to appreciate life after his harrowing experiences and who was he to take away the life of an innocent creature when he himself had been spared? Sadly, Christopher Walken goes the other way after the war. In the beginning he was a happy patriot giggling in the happy aftermath of a wedding with friends (I believe it was his wedding but I forget, and I didn't feel like just rewatching that part). The point is that by the time it's the end of the movie, with the famous Russian Roulette scene, we see quite plainly the terrible personal costs of the war. Quite honestly, and Apocalypse Now was already filming when this was released so it doesn't count, no one should have made a Vietnam movie after this movie came out. Because it did everything so well. It got its point across without being too blatant and it beautifully told a very personal story with relatable characters. It didn't whine, but it made the same points that Oliver Stone feebly tries to get across. Why Jon Voight's movie also got nominated in the same year I have no idea, because even though it was pretty good it's got nothing on this movie. So watch it on a day when you have 3 hours to spare and you feel like your life sucks, because you will probably end up feeling better about your life by comparison.
Well that's it for this year, which even though it took me a while to finish up I really quite enjoyed. I have already seen every other winner for this decade, because they're all really good and one of them is the greatest film of all time, so I hope that the nominees that I haven't seen are also of high quality. All I know for now is that the next installment will include: classic neuroticism, nazism...umm...and on a more positive note: LITERALLY THE EXEMPLIFICATION OF MY CHILDHOOD AND A BIG PART OF WHY I LOVE MOVIES AS MUCH AS I DO. So yeah you'll want to be here for that.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
1979: The Year that Rorschach Came of Age and President Bartlet Descended Into Madness with Morpheus
Is the second part of my title not the greatest idea for a sitcom/cooking show/spinoff ever? I think it is. This is a year with a lot of variety, which is good because it allows for a wide spectrum of ranting. Although overall I'd describe the films of this year to be at least tolerable and sometimes even really good. See? The 70s are better already. And as I mentioned before, there's only one winner that I haven't seen already so I at least know that the winners are good. We'll mix it up a bit and be optimistic, just for a change of pace.
We will begin with a shockingly good movie: All That Jazz. I say shockingly good because at first I didn't like it. With the title and the subject matter (the semi-autobiographical story about a Broadway choreographer/dancer/director) I figured I was in for a lot of fun dancing and singing. I thought it'd be funny and enjoyable and uplifting. This was not the case. It was depressing. Like, really depressing. Once I got over the initial shock that the movie was going to be depressing, I remembered that I love depressing movies because they're entirely more interesting than uplifting ones. This movie reverse-reminded me of The Singing Detective. That sentence requires explanation. When something "reverse-reminds" me of something else, it means that the second thing came out after the first thing but I saw the second one first. Wow, I just made it more confusing. To clarify: this movie from 1979 reverse-reminded me of the 1980s British miniseries about a hospital-confined mystery writer who hallucinates elaborate dance sequences. Both the movie and the miniseries are about men with debilitating diseases who become more and more engrossed in their fantasy worlds. This film begins as an interesting look into the hectic life of a high-profile Broadway personality. So interesting that my dreams of working in show business were briefly shattered since I'd rather not require alcohol, pills, and sex to simply get out of bed in the morning. The manner in which this ritual was displayed reverse-reminded me of Requiem for a Dream. I'm going to coin that phrase, I am not even kidding. Anyway, after a good forty minutes or so of pill-popping we learn that the main character doesn't have long to live. And that's when the movie becomes way better and way more of a downer. But it makes up for it by being so ahead of its time in terms of style and by having a truly powerful ending. Even though it's my second favorite of the year's nominees, I think it should've won. I'll explain why in the next paragraph. But before that, the last thing I'll say about this film is that it wasn't afraid to just run with its own style and go against expectations for artistic reasons (instead of Battlestar Galactica "the only creativity behind our doctor's character was that we wanted to create the opposite of Dr. McCoy" reasons). It does its own thing not to shock people but to make the great movie that they wanted to make.
But as I said, it wasn't my favorite movie from the year. This was: Apocalypse Now. I have strict rules about when to mention film titles, and I don't mention them until I reach that film's paragraph. Which is why I won't say what the winner in 1978 was, only that it was a Vietnam movie. So I can see why they wouldn't want another Vietnam movie winning in this year, even though it's far and away the best Vietnam movie ever made (of the ones I've seen. So basically all of them). The reason for this is that it's not really a "Vietnam movie." It takes place during the war and it illustrates many negative aspects of the war, but it's really a movie about human nature. It's based on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (which I wrote a 100% paper on in high school by writing about Batman and the Joker and substituting their names for the protagonist and antagonist of the novel) but I think there are also some strong comparisons to be made to Dante's "Inferno" even if those comparisons were unintentional. The film brilliantly delves further and further into the darkness of humanity as they travel deeper into the heart of Vietnam. That's pretty much what the book is about, but the subtle ways that Coppola achieves this are outstanding. For instance, Harrison Ford is in the movie at the very beginning and pretty much never again. So you're all excited because there's Han Solo! This movie will be awesome because there's Han Solo! Well we leave the civilized world behind and Ford with it. Then we see Robert Duvall and he's being kind of disturbing with his "napalm in the morning" bit but we kind of enjoy it anyway. Because who doesn't appreciate a "hate to love him" crazy general? Well we leave him behind too. And as the characters travel further and further into the country we are less and less familiar with the characters (and the actors who portray them) and the situations become tougher and tougher to understand morally. As moviegoers, we can forgive certain acts when we see it from a certain point of view. But this movie does a great job at showing us human depravity at its most base. And where the comparisons to the "Inferno" come into play is that all of these people seem like they've been in their respective situations for a long time, and that they'll never leave. The whole "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter sequence was enthralling for us, but for Duvall's character it was a regular occurrence. The men who revolt by trying to grope the visiting Playboy bunnies have probably faced the same situation countless times. I don't want to come off as a chauvenist, but that scene is reminiscent of many classic visions of Hades. The one guy can see the water and the food but the closer he gets, the further away it goes. And poor Sisyphus has to push that rock up the hill only to have it fall again. So in this movie they can have scantily-clad women paraded before them but they're not allowed to touch. That's just cruel, I'd rather not see any women at all because it'd be easier to forget about Vietnam's abysmal dating situation. And then when we finally reach the end of the journey, we begin to understand by Colonel Kurtz was driven mad. It's made even more perfect by the fact that it's Marlon Brando: the only man who was masculine enough to both lead a crime family and sire Superman. Excellent casting, as was the casting of Martin Sheen as the hero of the piece. Everything about the movie is just outstanding, in fact I've gone on entirely too long about it. It's a rough movie and it's not for everyone, but it's amazing and young Laurence Fishburne is in it so if you can take it you should watch it. I haven't yet watched the "Redux" version but when I get the recent ultimate Blu-Ray release for Christmas (mom and dad: hint!) I will certainly check it out.
Perhaps it's good that I said even more than usual about that movie because I don't have much to say about the next two, beginning with Breaking Away. It's not a bad film by any means but it's not particularly original either (even in 1979). The film quality looks like an old camcorder that was in widescreen for unknown reasons, so I hope that was intentional and not indicative of a super low budget. It gives the film a more realistic quality and makes the characters more relatable. Or maybe it's just the same 70s film stock that makes all the women on Family Feud look funny. It's entirely possible. The film dates itself in several other ways, such as using the term "cutter" to describe people other than emo kids that harm themselves in order to impress Twihards who find that attractive. The movie is the classic "coming of age" story that I ordinarily find annoying but since the characters in the movie actually aim to do something with their lives instead of spending the majority of the film whining, it's actually pretty good. So it kind of weaves in a story about competitive bicycling with the "angst over going to college and leaving home" story. This is something I keep emphasizing and this movie seems to get it: some plots can't carry a movie on their own. Since this movie has two distinct threads that drive the story, neither of which would be enough on their own, it all kind of works. Seeing young Rorschach and young Dennis Quaid is also entertaining on its own. I also loved that the dude in the movie lied about being Italian to impress a girl. Not because of its inherent entertainment value, which reeks of a rejected Brady Bunch script, but simply because such things could never work today. As soon as you were Facebook friends with the girl the lie would fade away and you'd be seen for the schmuck you really are. It was way easier to fabricate Venitian playboy bicyclist identities back then, it was a better time. So that's pretty much it. The movie is kinda funny, kinda touching, kinda good.
I have even less to say about Norma Rae. Please read that sentence to yourself in a way that doesn't rhyme as blatantly, because rhyming is silly in this context. This movie was the only truly less-than-mediocre one in the entire year. So I really shouldn't complain about it because of what I was subjected to in the 80s. But I will. Basically this was the precursor to Erin Brockovich. I'm not going to use my newly coined phrase to describe this situation though, because if I overuse it now then I can't use it later. I know it sounds silly to say that this movie based on a true story was the precursor to another movie based on another true story, but they're so similar that it's frightening. Except that the Julia Roberts movie is good. I'm told that this movie was praised in large part because of its relevance to the whole sexual liberation situation, a theme common to many 70s movies I've seen so far and I'm not even through 1978 yet with my viewing schedule. This is kind of like the Vietnam thing where making a movie that voices things that everyone has already voiced isn't really interesting, unless you make it interesting like Coppola did. So while I'm certainly in favor of movies that cast a positive light on women, I don't think this movie does that. Erin Brockovich (the character and real woman, not the movie) knew how to use her femininity as a weapon and also put forth a logical and well-constructed argument in order to save the day. I'd say that's pretty empowering. Whereas Sally Field's character in this movie, Norma, just gets up and whines in a Southern accent until people listen to her. If anything that makes her look like the type of female stereotype the feminist movement was trying to stifle. Is she an independent woman because she works in the factory and supports her kids much like a stereotypical man might? Sure. But in order to fight injustice she just complains louder than anybody. In fact, I'm feeling brave here so I'll say it: she nags. She might as well be hitting her sugar daddy up for new earrings except the sugar daddy is the labor union and the earrings are improved working conditions and rights. I'll take Erin any day over this lady, and not just because she's better looking. She's simply more admirable from any standing point.
Well with any luck you're thinking to yourself, "wow what an enlightened and forward-thinking man." I sincerely doubt you are thinking that, but even if you are you probably won't be after I discuss this year's winner: Kramer vs. Kramer. I swear to God I am not trying to crap all over the female gender. In fact, a girl in the dorm once drunkenly stated: "I think Domenic is gay because he's around drunk women all the time and he never tries to take advantage of them." See? I'm so chivalrous that women think I'm not attracted to them! Ponder that for a minute and what it means societally. I'll wait. You done? Okay, good. My point is that this film is touted as another step forward for women because it shows both the father's side and the mother's side of a divorce. Dustin Hoffman plays the dad and Meryl Streep plays the mom. I usually don't particularly like either of them, but they're both good here. Here's my problem though: Meryl is in a little bit of the first ten minutes and then she's gone for almost an hour. So how are we supposed to see things from her point of view when she's not even in it? She leaves her husband and her son for initially undisclosed reasons, and if I didn't already know that the film centered on their custody battle in court (and if she was played by a less well-known actress) then I'd have thought she was gone for good and the movie was about a workaholic father who learned to spend more time with his son. Instead, just as the movie is getting all nice and touching the mom shows up again and wants to take the kid back. So then the audience hates her because they've spent the entire movie watching the father and son build a loving relationship. How is that showing both sides equally? She redeems herself at the end of the movie, and we certainly eventually see her side of things but the hero of the movie is far and away the father. Remember way back when I ranted about The Hours? Just to clarify: I thought that was a really good movie and I hyperbolize a lot so that my blogs won't be more repetitive than they probably already are. But I did have one legitimate problem with that movie: Julianne Moore left her husband and her son. I could totally roll with it if it was just the husband but I can't forgive anyone leaving their children. If Kramer had switched things up and the father was the one who left I can guarantee you he would be universally viewed as a villain. She abandoned her child! She abandoned her boy! I had to say it, sorry. Just be glad I didn't make the "milkshake" reference. Overall point: this movie is well-done but it's far beneath Best Picture standards. And since the Internet tells me it was a big hit simply because of its societal impact, I dislike that for two reasons. One: as I've said before, societal impact alone is enough for a nomination and not a win. Two: it doesn't even make a good societal statement. Still in all, it's a ton better than most 80s nominees so let's try to bring it back to optimism a little bit.
Overall, a great start to the decade. I can't even tell you how excited I am to have a lot of great movies ahead of me to watch instead of drivel. I might even rewatch a few things I've already seen because they're so good. We won't quite be at that point yet in my next entry, but I can tell you that it will include: Bugsy Segal having a supernatural identity crisis, Jake LaMotta having a post-traumatic stress identity crisis, and yet another woman having a sexual liberation-style identity crisis that will probably get me some more negative press even though that's not what I intend. Positive though! Let's be positive!
We will begin with a shockingly good movie: All That Jazz. I say shockingly good because at first I didn't like it. With the title and the subject matter (the semi-autobiographical story about a Broadway choreographer/dancer/director) I figured I was in for a lot of fun dancing and singing. I thought it'd be funny and enjoyable and uplifting. This was not the case. It was depressing. Like, really depressing. Once I got over the initial shock that the movie was going to be depressing, I remembered that I love depressing movies because they're entirely more interesting than uplifting ones. This movie reverse-reminded me of The Singing Detective. That sentence requires explanation. When something "reverse-reminds" me of something else, it means that the second thing came out after the first thing but I saw the second one first. Wow, I just made it more confusing. To clarify: this movie from 1979 reverse-reminded me of the 1980s British miniseries about a hospital-confined mystery writer who hallucinates elaborate dance sequences. Both the movie and the miniseries are about men with debilitating diseases who become more and more engrossed in their fantasy worlds. This film begins as an interesting look into the hectic life of a high-profile Broadway personality. So interesting that my dreams of working in show business were briefly shattered since I'd rather not require alcohol, pills, and sex to simply get out of bed in the morning. The manner in which this ritual was displayed reverse-reminded me of Requiem for a Dream. I'm going to coin that phrase, I am not even kidding. Anyway, after a good forty minutes or so of pill-popping we learn that the main character doesn't have long to live. And that's when the movie becomes way better and way more of a downer. But it makes up for it by being so ahead of its time in terms of style and by having a truly powerful ending. Even though it's my second favorite of the year's nominees, I think it should've won. I'll explain why in the next paragraph. But before that, the last thing I'll say about this film is that it wasn't afraid to just run with its own style and go against expectations for artistic reasons (instead of Battlestar Galactica "the only creativity behind our doctor's character was that we wanted to create the opposite of Dr. McCoy" reasons). It does its own thing not to shock people but to make the great movie that they wanted to make.
But as I said, it wasn't my favorite movie from the year. This was: Apocalypse Now. I have strict rules about when to mention film titles, and I don't mention them until I reach that film's paragraph. Which is why I won't say what the winner in 1978 was, only that it was a Vietnam movie. So I can see why they wouldn't want another Vietnam movie winning in this year, even though it's far and away the best Vietnam movie ever made (of the ones I've seen. So basically all of them). The reason for this is that it's not really a "Vietnam movie." It takes place during the war and it illustrates many negative aspects of the war, but it's really a movie about human nature. It's based on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (which I wrote a 100% paper on in high school by writing about Batman and the Joker and substituting their names for the protagonist and antagonist of the novel) but I think there are also some strong comparisons to be made to Dante's "Inferno" even if those comparisons were unintentional. The film brilliantly delves further and further into the darkness of humanity as they travel deeper into the heart of Vietnam. That's pretty much what the book is about, but the subtle ways that Coppola achieves this are outstanding. For instance, Harrison Ford is in the movie at the very beginning and pretty much never again. So you're all excited because there's Han Solo! This movie will be awesome because there's Han Solo! Well we leave the civilized world behind and Ford with it. Then we see Robert Duvall and he's being kind of disturbing with his "napalm in the morning" bit but we kind of enjoy it anyway. Because who doesn't appreciate a "hate to love him" crazy general? Well we leave him behind too. And as the characters travel further and further into the country we are less and less familiar with the characters (and the actors who portray them) and the situations become tougher and tougher to understand morally. As moviegoers, we can forgive certain acts when we see it from a certain point of view. But this movie does a great job at showing us human depravity at its most base. And where the comparisons to the "Inferno" come into play is that all of these people seem like they've been in their respective situations for a long time, and that they'll never leave. The whole "Ride of the Valkyries" helicopter sequence was enthralling for us, but for Duvall's character it was a regular occurrence. The men who revolt by trying to grope the visiting Playboy bunnies have probably faced the same situation countless times. I don't want to come off as a chauvenist, but that scene is reminiscent of many classic visions of Hades. The one guy can see the water and the food but the closer he gets, the further away it goes. And poor Sisyphus has to push that rock up the hill only to have it fall again. So in this movie they can have scantily-clad women paraded before them but they're not allowed to touch. That's just cruel, I'd rather not see any women at all because it'd be easier to forget about Vietnam's abysmal dating situation. And then when we finally reach the end of the journey, we begin to understand by Colonel Kurtz was driven mad. It's made even more perfect by the fact that it's Marlon Brando: the only man who was masculine enough to both lead a crime family and sire Superman. Excellent casting, as was the casting of Martin Sheen as the hero of the piece. Everything about the movie is just outstanding, in fact I've gone on entirely too long about it. It's a rough movie and it's not for everyone, but it's amazing and young Laurence Fishburne is in it so if you can take it you should watch it. I haven't yet watched the "Redux" version but when I get the recent ultimate Blu-Ray release for Christmas (mom and dad: hint!) I will certainly check it out.
Perhaps it's good that I said even more than usual about that movie because I don't have much to say about the next two, beginning with Breaking Away. It's not a bad film by any means but it's not particularly original either (even in 1979). The film quality looks like an old camcorder that was in widescreen for unknown reasons, so I hope that was intentional and not indicative of a super low budget. It gives the film a more realistic quality and makes the characters more relatable. Or maybe it's just the same 70s film stock that makes all the women on Family Feud look funny. It's entirely possible. The film dates itself in several other ways, such as using the term "cutter" to describe people other than emo kids that harm themselves in order to impress Twihards who find that attractive. The movie is the classic "coming of age" story that I ordinarily find annoying but since the characters in the movie actually aim to do something with their lives instead of spending the majority of the film whining, it's actually pretty good. So it kind of weaves in a story about competitive bicycling with the "angst over going to college and leaving home" story. This is something I keep emphasizing and this movie seems to get it: some plots can't carry a movie on their own. Since this movie has two distinct threads that drive the story, neither of which would be enough on their own, it all kind of works. Seeing young Rorschach and young Dennis Quaid is also entertaining on its own. I also loved that the dude in the movie lied about being Italian to impress a girl. Not because of its inherent entertainment value, which reeks of a rejected Brady Bunch script, but simply because such things could never work today. As soon as you were Facebook friends with the girl the lie would fade away and you'd be seen for the schmuck you really are. It was way easier to fabricate Venitian playboy bicyclist identities back then, it was a better time. So that's pretty much it. The movie is kinda funny, kinda touching, kinda good.
I have even less to say about Norma Rae. Please read that sentence to yourself in a way that doesn't rhyme as blatantly, because rhyming is silly in this context. This movie was the only truly less-than-mediocre one in the entire year. So I really shouldn't complain about it because of what I was subjected to in the 80s. But I will. Basically this was the precursor to Erin Brockovich. I'm not going to use my newly coined phrase to describe this situation though, because if I overuse it now then I can't use it later. I know it sounds silly to say that this movie based on a true story was the precursor to another movie based on another true story, but they're so similar that it's frightening. Except that the Julia Roberts movie is good. I'm told that this movie was praised in large part because of its relevance to the whole sexual liberation situation, a theme common to many 70s movies I've seen so far and I'm not even through 1978 yet with my viewing schedule. This is kind of like the Vietnam thing where making a movie that voices things that everyone has already voiced isn't really interesting, unless you make it interesting like Coppola did. So while I'm certainly in favor of movies that cast a positive light on women, I don't think this movie does that. Erin Brockovich (the character and real woman, not the movie) knew how to use her femininity as a weapon and also put forth a logical and well-constructed argument in order to save the day. I'd say that's pretty empowering. Whereas Sally Field's character in this movie, Norma, just gets up and whines in a Southern accent until people listen to her. If anything that makes her look like the type of female stereotype the feminist movement was trying to stifle. Is she an independent woman because she works in the factory and supports her kids much like a stereotypical man might? Sure. But in order to fight injustice she just complains louder than anybody. In fact, I'm feeling brave here so I'll say it: she nags. She might as well be hitting her sugar daddy up for new earrings except the sugar daddy is the labor union and the earrings are improved working conditions and rights. I'll take Erin any day over this lady, and not just because she's better looking. She's simply more admirable from any standing point.
Well with any luck you're thinking to yourself, "wow what an enlightened and forward-thinking man." I sincerely doubt you are thinking that, but even if you are you probably won't be after I discuss this year's winner: Kramer vs. Kramer. I swear to God I am not trying to crap all over the female gender. In fact, a girl in the dorm once drunkenly stated: "I think Domenic is gay because he's around drunk women all the time and he never tries to take advantage of them." See? I'm so chivalrous that women think I'm not attracted to them! Ponder that for a minute and what it means societally. I'll wait. You done? Okay, good. My point is that this film is touted as another step forward for women because it shows both the father's side and the mother's side of a divorce. Dustin Hoffman plays the dad and Meryl Streep plays the mom. I usually don't particularly like either of them, but they're both good here. Here's my problem though: Meryl is in a little bit of the first ten minutes and then she's gone for almost an hour. So how are we supposed to see things from her point of view when she's not even in it? She leaves her husband and her son for initially undisclosed reasons, and if I didn't already know that the film centered on their custody battle in court (and if she was played by a less well-known actress) then I'd have thought she was gone for good and the movie was about a workaholic father who learned to spend more time with his son. Instead, just as the movie is getting all nice and touching the mom shows up again and wants to take the kid back. So then the audience hates her because they've spent the entire movie watching the father and son build a loving relationship. How is that showing both sides equally? She redeems herself at the end of the movie, and we certainly eventually see her side of things but the hero of the movie is far and away the father. Remember way back when I ranted about The Hours? Just to clarify: I thought that was a really good movie and I hyperbolize a lot so that my blogs won't be more repetitive than they probably already are. But I did have one legitimate problem with that movie: Julianne Moore left her husband and her son. I could totally roll with it if it was just the husband but I can't forgive anyone leaving their children. If Kramer had switched things up and the father was the one who left I can guarantee you he would be universally viewed as a villain. She abandoned her child! She abandoned her boy! I had to say it, sorry. Just be glad I didn't make the "milkshake" reference. Overall point: this movie is well-done but it's far beneath Best Picture standards. And since the Internet tells me it was a big hit simply because of its societal impact, I dislike that for two reasons. One: as I've said before, societal impact alone is enough for a nomination and not a win. Two: it doesn't even make a good societal statement. Still in all, it's a ton better than most 80s nominees so let's try to bring it back to optimism a little bit.
Overall, a great start to the decade. I can't even tell you how excited I am to have a lot of great movies ahead of me to watch instead of drivel. I might even rewatch a few things I've already seen because they're so good. We won't quite be at that point yet in my next entry, but I can tell you that it will include: Bugsy Segal having a supernatural identity crisis, Jake LaMotta having a post-traumatic stress identity crisis, and yet another woman having a sexual liberation-style identity crisis that will probably get me some more negative press even though that's not what I intend. Positive though! Let's be positive!
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