Probably one of my favorite lines of all time. Well, the entire speech that it's contained within anyway. It all comes from this year's winner: a film that has long been one of my favorite movies. The rest of the year I could mostly do without, which is unfortunate because that doesn't really reflect my overall feelings toward the 70s. We'll see how the 60s go...there's a lot of great stuff I've already seen. There are also a ton of musicals that are like two and a half hours long. I love musicals, but overly cheery/overly long ones are a bit trying. So I guess we'll see. But we've got to finish this decade first, so away we go.
Look...up in the sky...it's not a bird...there is a plane involved...it's Airport. See now, if this was a visual blog I would have said that in an April from Parks and Recreation/Ben Stein voice. And why? Because this "disaster" movie is horrendously boring and also not suspenseful. I was first suspicious when I saw that this movie was rated G. How can a film about a bomb on a plane be suspenseful if the ratings board said it was just as appropriate for children as Cinderella? For the record, I think the film should have been PG since the bomb actually goes off and a I think a dude gets shot too. But that's not really the point. The point is that the "crisis" doesn't enter into the plot for about an hour and twenty minutes. That is absurd. What if the terrorists in Die Hard took that long to show up and everything before that was just awkward small talk between John McClane and his soon-to-be-ex-wife's co-workers? That would have sucked. Like this movie. It spends that time developing uninteresting characters with cliché storylines, and then those storylines go absolutely nowhere because as soon as the crisis is solved the movie just ends. Not only is the comedy classic Airplane! a more enjoyable film, it's quite actually a better movie. I am not even kidding. It's structured better and the characters are better. I wish I was hyperbolizing. Because this movie has plotlines that go nowhere and a crisis story that is neither suspenseful nor solved by the protagonists. That's right. The "plan" they came up with to stop the bomb failed, even after a particularly silly piece of deux ex machina for setup, and the bomb blew up. Then they land the plane. That was the crisis. So in other words: if you're unlucky enough to be on a plane when a bomb goes off, don't worry! Because as long as your plane does, in fact, have a pilot: you will be okay. Stupid. How they got Dean Martin and Burt Lancaster into this movie is a mystery. Actually it's not a mystery, it's called money. But how they scrounged up enough money with their crap script to be able to afford Dean and Burt is a mystery. And how the Academy watched this sub-par suspense film that is also a way sub-par drama film and felt the need to nominate it is the biggest mystery of all.
A movie I'm still watching is Five Easy Pieces. You know what that means: I'm bored enough during it that I would ordinarily be also doing a crossword puzzle or re-reading Stephen Colbert's "I am America (And So Can You!)" which is probably the greatest book of all time. But when a movie such as this is the final film for a decade I like to instead do a blog entry during it, so that my time is spent doing an almost worthwhile venture. Which is a good way to sum up this film: an almost worthwhile venture. There's the big famous "wheat toast" scene which was probably over-hyped for me, although I did like it. Then there's the rest of the movie, which has an interesting premise but isn't delivered particularly well. It has one of my favorite film tropes: a person who could have been really great in a particular field but who, for whatever reason, ended up being just some schmuck working on an oil rig. That oil rig part is just for this film, but the rest is a trope. And it's one I find interesting because it raises questions of destiny and purpose. Questions that for me were epitomized by the bad guy in the new Star Trek movie (of all things) when he says, "James T. Kirk was a great man...but that was another life." Can Kirk still be the man he was supposed to be even though his life was drastically changed from the original Kirk we know and love? It remains to be seen. So could Jack Nicholson's character have lived up to his full potential if things had gone slightly differently? Good question. Too bad it's not really explored or answered. Unlike Brando's famous "I coulda been a contender" scene from the excellent 1954 Best Picture Winner. That was a great scene because it summed up an entire lifetime's worth of dilemmas in one scene. And it did it without being too over-the-top or preachy. I would have preferred this film to be over-the-top or preachy to being what it is: not much. It hints at interesting things without fully exploring them. Nicholson's character is good and he plays him well, but I never really felt a connection to him or to anything else in the movie. He was a child prodigy who grew up to not do much. So why didn't he do much? This was not answered adequately. It spent too much time showing how boring his life actually was. All of that being said, it's not a bad movie. It's well-written and the supporting cast is pretty good. I guess it's just a little too mundane for me to fully like it.
Which is still preferable to the odious mess that is Love Story. Prepare yourselves for a rant ladies and gents. This is probably one of my most hated films that I've watched on the Oscar escapade. Not worst per se, although it's pretty bad, but most hated. It's basically the origin story of the modern chick flick. So its malice just keeps going and going. And just to be clear, there's a difference between a chick flick like Music & Lyrics (which is actually quite charming and has a catchy song) and chick flicks like this which are just tears and human sadness fused onto celluloid. Not for any particular reason. Just to provide an emotional hook for the audience so they can cry and wail and go see it again with each of their girlfriends. Here's the story: guy meets girl. Guy goes out with girl, not because of an intellectual attraction but because they're both attractive and she served him coffee. Guy marries girl. Girl dies. Movie ends. There's no other point to it than that. If this was cleverly written it would be somewhat forgiveable. It's not. If its famous line, "love means never having to say you're sorry" was true or applicable to real life then that would be forgiveable. It's not. In fact, it's dangerous when applied to real life. And that brings me to my somewhat-radical point. Movies like this are basically the female emotional equivalent of porn. I say that because males are usually physical-oriented, hence classic porn. It creates an unrealistic portrayal of women and male-female relationships, which isn't nearly as dangerous as Dr. Dobson would have you believe. I say this based on an interview he had with Ted Bundy, the point of which was "porn made me do it." It will not make you kill 60+ people. But it's still pretty bad. Especially since it creates a very frat-esque mentality for a lot of men (based on my college observations, not speaking abstractly). Movies like this one, on the other hand, create a more dangerous unrealistic portrayal of male-female relationships that women are more susceptible to. The reason being that you come away from it thinking that even if things in your relationship aren't going great, don't worry! Because love means never having to say you're sorry. So if he doesn't apologize for being an ass, no sweat. And of course you can change him. The guy in the movie was changed by the girl, so your douchebag of a boyfriend will change too right? Not so much. On the male side of things: it's pretty obvious that if you're a pizza boy you won't actually bang every woman that orders the "pizza with extra sausage." But there are a lot of women who stay with men they shouldn't be with because of a mentality that is largely encouraged by movies like this. And to be clear: I think extreme violent content is too extreme to influence anyone seriously, unless they have other serious mental problems. The dangerous influences are the ones that are representational of actual real-life situations. Not that Ryan O'Neal's character is too terrible because he's not and I don't want to imply otherwise. But every now and again I see an opportunity to talk about things in society that irk me, instead of just saying "the dialogue was bad." Oh, and the dialogue was bad (by the way). Near the end she says, "I feel like I'm falling constantly. Do you ever feel that way?" And I thought to myself: don't say when you met her...don't say when you met her. And he said, "every day since I met you." Barf. I might as well have just watched two episodes of Gossip Girl. I could literally go on for forever about how much I don't like this movie and movies like it, but I'll leave it at that.
Mercifully, I really enjoyed MASH. So much so that I ordered all 11 seasons of the TV show. Because I love humor that exists where humor has no business existing. Like in the Korean War. The reason I like this so much is that all humor comes from a dark place. Humor is making light of terrible situations. Or laughing at things that bother us. Satire is pointing out things that are wrong with the world by finding entertainment in it. This film takes an incredibly serious thing, the Korean War (although it's really a thinly veiled portrayal of the Vietnam War), and makes it downright ridiculous. The theme song "Suicide is Painless," which is sung in an almost upbeat way, sets the tone for the rest of the film. The movie isn't laugh-out-loud funny too often, but it's very entertaining and certainly amusing and ingenius with regards to its satire. It's kind of a next-gen Marx Brothers film when you really look at it. Because their humor was pure anarchy: non-sequiturs and random breakings of the fourth wall. That's what this movie is: very droll and very dark humor. Love it. It includes a scene where a man nicknamed "Painless" is contemplating suicide because of his latent homosexual tendencies and so they hold a dinner in his honor (framed like DaVinci's "Last Supper") while another soldier sings "Suicide is Painless." He then takes the suicide pill, which is actually a sleeping pill, and wakes up next to a woman who sleeps with him to "cure him of his ailment." That is simply too absurd and convoluted to not be awesome. I would talk more about why this movie is great but I kind of went off on that last movie so I'm as exhausted of writing this as you are of reading it. Suffice it to say that the film was way ahead of its time, as was the show I'm told. I will find out for sure soon.
Easily the year's best film, and indeed one of the decade's and century's too, is Patton. It would be enough if the movie was just a great war film. And it is a well-written and well-directed film. But it also contains a phenomenal tour-de-force of a performance from George C. Scott as General Patton. He truly became Patton, he didn't just play him. He played him so well that Karl Malden's performance in the film went almost entirely unnoticed (but it's also a good performance). Not surprisingly, the masterful screenplay (which won the Oscar too) was written by none other than Mr. Francis Ford Coppola. And it was when he won for this movie that Paramount allowed him to continue working on The Godfather. Which makes this film even more awesome. Another great aspect is that a lot of Patton's dialogue in the film is made up of things he said in real life. The famous opening speech in front of the large American flag is almost identical to the actual speech, with the language slightly cleaned up. Coppola knew that Patton was a controversial figure because a lot of people hate him and a lot of people love him. Not too many in-betweeners. I love him, for the record. But it's written in such a way that if you want to see him as a tyrannical military leader then you can. He wrote it to appease both schools of thought. It also does something I love: fictionalizing real life without taking it too far. Scenes such as Patton reflecting on his belief that he is the "everlasting spirit of battle" illustrate this. He believes that he is this reincarnated spirit of war that arises throughout history when it is needed most. Did he actually believe this in real life? I wouldn't put it past him, but probably not. But it doesn't matter because it doesn't stretch the truth too much. It just makes it more cinematic. There's nothing in the movie that misrepresents Patton or World War II, it just takes what's true and makes it interesting from a cinematic point of view. Totally hard to do but Coppola killed it. I should also point out that Franklin J. Schaffner does an excellent job directing that is perfectly complemented by Jerry Goldsmith's score. It is a fairly long film but it earns its length and has a good amount of well-filmed action too (for those tragically only interested in that).
Well that's it for the 1970s. Not a bad decade. In fact, a pretty great one overall. Definitely some timeless classics, including the best movie ever. So that's better than William Hurt being weepy right? I think so. But the 60s now loom ahead of me and I hope I enjoy them. It will begin with a man with six wives, two criminals and murderers, and male prostitutes. Who says content got worse over the years?
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