If Judy Garland and co. encountered those three things on the way to Oz instead, it would've been a very different movie. No, this isn't the year of Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the iconic duo. So don't get your hopes up. But good old Sunny D (a nickname for Redford's character that never seemed to take off) was behind the camera this year so I guess that's something to be excited about (not really though). Something to actually get excited about is that two of the movies are in black and white and they're the only two good movies in the bunch. Neither one was the winner of course because that is the way of things. None of the movies in this year are particularly light...and I know I've mentioned how much I love drama and intense stuff but things don't have to be dreary all the time. Some of the most dramatic and heart-wrenching movies I've ever seen also made me laugh at times. These films need a sense of humor. Only the bad ones though.
Ironically, the first on the list actually does have quite a bit of humor in it: Coal Miner's Daughter. Can you tell that I don't sketch out an outline for my blogs? Don't sit there and feel like I'm jipping you though, I've never outlined a paper in my life. Except when people made me, and then it was sub par. And I'm not sure how much of this movie was actually supposed to be funny, or perhaps I should say "humorous." Because you don't really laugh out loud but you sit there and think to yourself: "hmm, that is amusing." That's actually something I found annoying about the film. All of the humor should have been removed. Wow, I should really go back and delete all of my talk about adding humor earlier. I won't though. Because I stand by it for the other two movies in technicolor, just not this one. The reason being that all of the humorous elements in this movie come from the main character being a stereotypical backwater hick trying to make it big in the music industry. The woman was still alive when the movie was released. So either she really is that dumb and didn't notice that they were making fun of her, or she's fully aware of her quirks and allows the movie to display them because she knows how the game is played. Maybe neither, I don't know. But the movie displays her husband as a money-hungry jerk who didn't care much about his wife's singing until it started bringing in the big bucks. Presumably any negative portrayals are offset by the title song, which says something along the lines of: "I'm proud to be a coal miner's daughter because it made me a bunch of money and so even though I might be a dumb hick I'm a lot smarter and richer than you are." The actual lyrics are more touching and heart-felt than that but if I'm here to lightly touch on the movie while I complain about it. If I just re-capped everything that would be boring. There's already a website for that which I frankly can't compete with and it's called IMDB. I will say that Sissy Spacek does a good job and has a really good singing voice. I also found it entertaining that earlier in her career she tried to break into country music but couldn't because she sounded too much like Loretta Lynn (who she plays in the movie). I was also really annoyed by the fact that the movie doesn't begin with "a" or "the" but since it refers to a song title I guess it's okay. Overall, the film falls into the "Hallmark" category for me. Fairly solid acting, it doesn't have bad dialogue, and it doesn't have bad direction. But none of it is particularly good either. I'm totally cool with Sissy's nomination (that is a ridiculous name, even for Hollywood). But the movie itself isn't anything too special.
A far better film is The Elephant Man. I just finished it, in fact. Notice I said "just finished it" and not "I'm currently watching it." Nowadays I spend literally all of my time watching movies and TV, as opposed to before when I spent all of my free time watching movies and TV. There's a huge difference, believe me. This means that I find it difficult to watch a whole movie or show without whipping out various Apple products to distract me. But all of my attention was easily focused on this beautifully filmed movie. David Lynch directed and co-wrote the film which stars the always amazing Anthony Hopkins. He's usually not upstaged by anyone but the title character is played to painful perfection by John Hurt. It's so rare that any of these nominees get me to cry, because even the good ones are just well-done and don't necessarily pull me in. But this one pulled me in, thanks mostly to Hurt's acting and a haunting musical score. The film centers around the real-life story of John Merrick: a horribly disfigured man who was a sideshow exhibit for most of his life. The film refrains from showing us his face until a good half an hour into the film, and it's a little longer before we hear him speak. People in the film, and presumably in life, wrongfully assumed that he was a dumb brute because he looked like a disfigured monster. But as it turned out he was quite articulate and intelligent for a man of any age at the time, and when Hopkins' character discovers him in the movie he was slightly younger than I am. He almost reminded me of a Phantom of the Opera type character: the hidden genius who never reaches his full potential because of his physical deformities. Of course it turns out that high society treats him with the same type of morbid curiosity that the lower-class circus goers did. This inevitably brings up the central theme of many stories of this type: the real monsters are the "normal" people. Thankfully, unlike the Phantom, Merrick never became what other people perceived him to be. The oft-quoted "I am a human being!" scene brought me to tears, even though I knew it was coming. Also, in case you were wondering, this film is the first one in black and white that I alluded to. It gives the movie the same feel as all of those Universal horror pictures, which is highly appropriate since they were all about the humanization of monsters. The original ones anyway. The countless sequels were about the monetization of celluloid. It also reminded me, in retrograde of course since the movie came first, of one of the best episodes of The X-Files: "The Post-Modern Prometheus." Everything about the episode from the music to the visual tone is a big throwback to this movie. I'm pretty sure I only mentioned that to showcase the fact that I watched that entire series 3 years ago and I can still recall episode titles from memory. Anyway, I was tempted to say that this was the best film of the year but that was before I remembered the other black and white film. It's still an excellent film that everyone should watch. Because you don't have to be deformed to be a societal outcast and you don't have to be a 19th century aristocrat to be a bigot.
Easily the best film of the year is in black and white for an entirely different reason: Raging Bull. The reasons for the color change aren't quite as clear as the film I just talked about but I suppose it's because the movie is about a boxer in the classic age of boxing and when you think of that era you think of cheap TVs in sports bars of the 50s. Or at least I do. Whatever the reason, it gives the film a distinct visual style which has never been emulated by anyone. Perhaps because no one would dare to try. This is my favorite Scorsese picture and I've been waiting to talk about it ever since I alluded to it in my 2006 entry. And if I didn't allude to it, I was thinking about it so my internal continuity is in tact. The film was perhaps not savory enough to be the winner but thankfully DeNiro's performance earned him an Oscar. The film itself deserved it too but DeNiro is the driving force. He plays Jake LaMotta, a man who could never leave his rage in the ring. The film examines the unfortunate dichotomy that is caused by his internal fury and penchant for self-torture. These are the factors that allowed him to succeed as a boxer, but they destroyed his personal life. He emotionally and at one point physically abuses his wife because he thinks she's cheating on him. Was she? It's irrelevant, because to him it was a reality. For a personality like that, even if everything is perfect they make things worse because for some reason they love to be miserable. This also adds to the boxing scenes, where DeNiro rarely shows any signs of pain during the unusually brutal fights. I mean, he shows signs of pain but he doesn't go and moan on the sidelines like Rocky. Because Jake loves the pain. The scenes are fleshed out by the entirely classical musical score. They make the scenes operatic tragedies. With every punch that Jake throws he is drawn further into his personal abyss. Eventually all he has left are stories and bad jokes that he tells to anyone in his club who will listen. I'm not sure what made the real Jake LaMotta the way he was but DeNiro was channeling it through every second. He immersed himself in the role to the point that he gained 60 pounds during shooting for the scenes where Jake is old and washed up. It's a fascinating character study because you don't feel bad for the man per se because he's kind of a huge jerk. But you have to wonder: why does talent have to come with a price? Whether he was a raging bull by nature or by nurture, that facet of his personality drove him to success and then took it all away. Marty Scorsese said he wanted the movie to show that life itself is one big boxing match and I think that came off splendidly. Ah well, much like another one of my favorites in 1971 I think this movie was a little too intense to be the winner. But it's widely considered one of the greatest films of all time and this year's winner isn't on any of those lists so there.
But before we talk about the winner we have to talk about Tess. I was a bit thrown off when I watched this movie because Netflix described it as "Roman Polanski's retelling of the classic novel." To me, when you call something a "retelling" then you're putting the story in a different context. Either you're adapting the same overall story and putting in your own words with your own characters, like how The Lion King is essentially Hamlet, or you're doing the same words and story in an updated context like Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet. The only thing that Polanski seemed to change was the title, and all he did was take away the "of the d'Urbervilles." How does it constitute a "retelling" if it's the same exact story in the same exact time period? Yeah you could say it's Polanski's take on the story, but then why don't they say that with every movie? You wouldn't call Milk Gus Van Sant's retelling of the tragic and inspiring true story. And I doubt Harvey Milk actually died with the reflection of Tosca on his face (just a thought) so that was Van Sant's "retelling" wasn't it? I ranted about all of that because for the first twenty minutes or so of the movie I was wondering if we were seeing the ancestor of the Tess that the movie was about. It's an entirely too long movie and so twenty minutes of backstory would have made sense. I thought maybe it was one of those "I'm a descendant of the first Tess and now the same things are happening to me in modern day" deals, and yes I've seen that done so it's not too much of a stretch. I can't remember any examples though because this paragraph is being written the morning after the first four and my brain takes a while to start up in the morning. But even in my diminished state I can recount the entire movie: servant chick becomes involved with her boss who then quasi-rapes her and she bears his child which dies shortly thereafter. Then she falls in love with this other dude who finds out about the first dude and thus breaks off his engagement with Tess. Then some other inane things happen over the next hour and a half and the ending scrawl tells us she was eventually hanged. That's pretty much it. The music was really good, I'll say that. And the performances were pretty good and everything, but nothing really happened in the whole movie and it was almost 3 hours long. I still stand by my previous assessment that "a period piece is a movie that is about nothing but takes place in the past." For some reason it wasn't quite as tough to watch as other movies of its type, probably just because of the music.
It's been far too often throughout the 80s that I felt the worst movie of the nominees turned out to be the winner. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it was the worst but it was tied for the worst: Ordinary People. Oh how I wish the title was some kind of joke referencing the fact that nothing in the movie is normal, and that perhaps it was some sort of social commentary about yuppies or something. Sadly it's a movie that's literally about normal people dealing with normal issues in a normal way. This is the type of refreshing idea that would make a good TV melodrama, because it would be nice to see a range of issues dealt with realistically. But as a movie it's just pointless. As I've explained on many occasions, I'm not a fan of movies that are acclaimed because they're "the first film to (fill in the blank)." This was apparently the first movie to heavily feature psychiatry in a way that didn't make it seem nutty. My only knowledge of how people viewed psychiatry prior to 1980 comes from what I've seen on Mad Men, but if that's any indication then the portrayal in the film is quite contrary to popular beliefs. Because the kid going to therapy is a regular guy, he's not Norman Bates. It would've been a lot more interesting if he was Norman Bates. As it stands, the film centers on an ordinary middle class family that suffers the loss of a child and how they cope with that loss. The other son predictably rebels and that's why he's in therapy. He's all mean to his parents and they don't know how to deal with him because it's tough enough dealing with teenagers let alone one that's lost a brother and yadda yadda. Now I realize that there are many who have been touched by such tragedies, and thankfully I am not one of them. So there's admittedly an emotional aspect to the story that I can't realistically tap into. But from an objective standing point this is a good thing. And objectively there is nothing special about this movie, and I know that was the point but did it really have to win? I can totally stand behind nominating a movie that dares to be a little different by being normal. And Robert Redford is awesome but if this is any indication of his other directorial efforts, he's way better in front of the camera. The whole thing feels like a side plot in another movie. Like maybe a movie about all of the various problems that a street has to deal with and this is just one of them. Sound like too much to pack into one movie? That's why it's better as a show. Not a show I would watch, just to clarify. So I applaud them for their depiction of therapy, easily the best part of the film even though it takes up a total of about 12 minutes, but they've got nothing on Lynch or Marty. Not even close.
And with that, we have completed the 80s. When I began my descent into this decade I was a bright-eyed hopeful college graduate (or at least as close to bright-eyed as I can be) and now I'm a broken shell of a man evaluating his next step in life. See what the decade did to me? Well I hope the 70s bring some better news. Maybe when I'm writing my closing paragraph on that decade I'll say: "gee, remember how down and out I was in the 80s? This is the opposite of that." I've already seen almost all of the winners so that's a good indication, hopefully the nominees will be of the same quality. For the immediate future all I can say is the next installment will include: Tootsie in tort, President Bartlet smelling napalm, and Morpheus piloting a sea vessel. Okay those last two were from the same movie but I never get to reference Morpheus so I couldn't resist.
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