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.