1971: The Year that Lex Luthor Picked his Feet in Poughkeepsie

There's an image. Especially since it's my least favorite version of Lex Luthor, Gene Hackman. Love Hackman in general. But his Lex Luthor is not good. Like, at all. But I'll be talking about him more later when I discuss one of the most overrated Best Picture winners ever. But it's still part of one of the better ensemble years of Nominees that I've been through thus far. And the winner is still a good movie, just not that good.

And certainly not better than A Clockwork Orange. Although its "ultraviolence" and heavily disturbed sexual themes and imagery were probably a bit much for 1971. It's surprising it was nominated at all really. The mother of a good friend of mine told me she saw this movie when she was like 8 or something crazy. How she wasn't scarred for life to the point of being institutionalized is beyond me. Because I only just saw it about a year ago and it disturbed me. Not much gets to me, mind you. Today I was eating my lunch whilst watching an episode of Bones where a person's head explodes on camera. I gave a startled chuckle and continued eating my sloppy joe. But this movie is crazy. It's also SO freaking good. I go back and forth over whether this is my favorite Kubrick film or his 1964 extraordinary dark comedy that I'll be discussing when I get to that year. Some say that this movie goes out of its way for the main character to engage in acts of exploitative violence. And to that I say: that was precisely the point. He is the absolute extreme of an unfeeling and violent individual. He and his friends rape a woman while "Singin' in the Rain" plays. Great scene, didn't recover until the Glee episode with the "Singin' in the Rain" Gwyneth Paltrow mashup. Somewhat less famous is a scene where Alex DeLarge (played to perfection by Malcolm McDowell) engages in a threesome with some random bimbos. The scene plays in superfast motion to a classical piece, completely dehumanizing the act. Here is a man who not only can't feel love, he can scarcely feel lust. And so what to do with this troublesome individual? Brainwash him. At least, that's what his dystopian society thinks to do. So they put him in that classic 70s brainwashing room (not sure if this movie originated it or if this was a "legit" psychological therapy method back then) and make him experience nausea whenever he experiences arousal. Either in a sexual way or in a violent way, although I'm sure Freud would say they're one and the same. I wouldn't, but whatever. The point is that this treatment raises the film's fundamental question: is it better to have a society of automatons? Or as the book explains: a society of "clockwork oranges," something that is organic on the outside and mechanical on the inside. There's no correct answer but the question is fascinating and no one could ask it better than Stanley Kubrick. This is quite possibly his masterpiece, and we remember it that way even if the Academy didn't see it that way at the time. I wouldn't recommend it to everybody, since it's pretty tough to watch, but if you're any kind of film historian or critic then it is required (and quite excellent) viewing.

I suppose you could say the same about Fiddler on the Roof, but for completely different reasons. This is why I love doing things alphabetically: because it's the only way you can go from a movie where a woman gets killed with a statue of a penis to a movie where a song lyric is "if I were a biddy-biddy rich, daidle deedle daidle daidle man." Fantastic. I actually had the pleasure of seeing this on Broadway when Doc Ock himself, Mr. Alfred Molina, was Tevye. Loved it then. Love the movie too. Although I do think that having plot points revolving around all three of his daughters marrying was a bit much. Especially since the suitors get more and more non-kosher as they go along. If he had a fourth daughter she'd have been trying to hook up with Lenin. Other than that though, the film wonderfully balances nostalgia by having it be funny at some times and sad at others. It's about hanging onto the old while embracing the new. All while singing and dancing! On that note, some of the musical numbers are a bit rougher than others. Specifically, I always felt that "Matchmaker" and "Do You Love Me?" were a tad forced. That being said, I love all of the other numbers. Especially "Sunrise, Sunset" which perfectly segues the tone of the first half of the film into the tone of the rest of the film. Still in all, I think the movie also has a lot more substance to it than a lot of musicals where you're simply waiting for the next song and not really caring about the rest of it. Tevye's words of wisdom are thoughtful and charming and the rest of his family manages to be quirky without being too annoying. It also manages to balance the fairly large number of characters. This is tougher than you'd think. It needs to make each character distinct so you don't get any of them mixed up, so you have to switch between them in such a way that you care about each of their stories without getting confused or bored. Many many many films fail at doing this and they lose the audience halfway through (especially when they're 3 hours long like this movie). So I give everyone in the film credit for making what is probably one of the best Broadway adaptations ever. And I should also give a special mention to my main man John Williams who orchestrated and adapted the music along with TOS Star Trek composer Alexander Courage. That's an awesome team-up if ever I heard one.

And then comes the inevitable bad film to ruin all of my rare positive vibes: The Last Picture Show. How many coming-of-age stories does one need? Every filmmaker in existence did, in fact, age at some point and they more than likely graduated high school too. Did they all have to make a movie about it? And did the Academy have to recognize them every time they did? Ironically, I'm pretty sure Tarantino didn't actually complete high school and yet he's probably one of the only people alive today that could make coming-of-age interesting from a film perspective. Maybe the only other person, Chris Nolan, should direct a coming-of-age British World War II movie with a main character that has a disability. Then he can net himself a Directing nomination for once (do you feel my rant coming on that subject? I know you do). But that's enough of that for now, I'm sure you'll be sick of hearing about it by the time my 2010 entry comes along. So what can be said about this particular take on angst and aging in Middle America? Well, it's in black and white. And Jeff Bridges is in it. And it's directed by Dr. Elliot Kupferberg. So all of that is well and good. But it's the same old story. According to Wikipedia, it was one of the first films to use a contemporary music soundtrack. Well, Waterworld might have been the first movie to do something notable but who'd care? So you know what? I'm not even going to bother. Hopefully this will end up being the last picture show that I have to sit through that involves these themes. It won't be.

But I'd love to see more movies like Nicholas and Alexandra: epics that are backed up by legit stories and production values. Thankfully I'm entering the era of such films. As you know, I'll gladly sit through a 3 hour movie if it's any good and earns its length. This film certainly doesn't rank up there with the all time great epics, but it's way better than Reds which dealt with a lot of the same historical issues and themes. But whereas Reds basically said, "let's take a story about Russia and somehow make it about America" this movie instead chose to radically say "let's take a story about Russia and make it about...Russia..." I mean, how would you like it if a foreigner made a movie about the Vietnam War and turned it into a "how did this screw-up positively affect our country?" Not that the Vietnam War and the overthrowing of the Russian government are particularly comparable as isolated incidents but hopefully you see what I mean. I don't want a movie that spews historical facts with no feeling behind them, because I could get that from any history book. I want to know the people involved. I want to feel their pain and their joy. I want to experience monumental historical events in a very personal way. And that's what this film does. Although I'm sure that they went out of their way to make Czar Nicholas look better than he was since we were steeped in the Cold War at the time, but still. It has a great musical score, a really good cast (most of whom I haven't heard of), and the pacing is really well done. Similar to what I was discussing earlier, it's difficult to do historical drama because you have to balance educating the audience with entertaining them. You have to assume that the audience knows certain things but you also can't assume that they know everything. And I think they do a really good job of peppering major historical events throughout a personal storyline. The characterization of Rasputin is especially interesting. He is shown as an eccentric man who legitimately cares for the Czar's hemophiliac son and whose public image is far worse than the reality. Is this true? No one can really know for certain. History is shaky on guys like him. And he gets killed just under 2 hours into the film, which was fairly shocking considering the prominent role he played and the remaining running time of the film. So it worked really well, although it's not quite as interesting after he leaves. So even though it's not the best of the "epics" it deals with a story that you don't see all that often and it does it well.

I wish I could say the same about this year's winner: The French Connection. It's by no means a bad movie. But here's my main beef with it: it came out a mere two months before Dirty Harry which is a superior film in every way. So they were clearly filmed at about the same time and neither can be seen as a ripoff of the other. But they both deal with the idea that not all cops are virtuous (shocker!). This was groundbreaking at the time, even though now there is probably not a single stright-laced cop who plays by the rules on television or in film. I know you might be thinking that since it heralded four sub-par sequels that the original Dirty Harry was just some 70s action flick. On the contrary: it depicts a fairly disturbed individual who just happens to be chasing a more disturbed individual. The violence is very real and not over-the-top or heavily choreographed. The same can be said of The French Connection...it's just not as good! I really can't get over how crazy this is. The movies are so similar and they picked the wrong one! And plus, neither is particularly good when compared to most Best Picture winners anyway. Gene Hackman does deliver a good performance as Popeye Doyle, but Best Actor? That's a bit much. I will say that it does have a truly enthralling car chase that ends with a moment of cold-blooded menace on the part of Hackman's character. But the rest of the film is quite honestly kind of dull. It's pretty realistic as far as a police investigation goes and it also depicts the police officers very realistically because it shows them bending the rules in such a way where they could legitimately avoid being caught. But they could have done that within a more interesting narrative. I like that the big bad guy ends up getting away, but we also didn't see him developed enough to the point where we really care that he gets away. Kind of like how Starscream gets away at the end of Transformers but no one cares because he's an ansillary bad guy (Michael Bay Sucks). So all of that ends up boiling down to one of my least favorite film tropes: "let's do it this way because nobody has done it this way before." That really bothers me. Don't film a movie using a purple hue simply because "it's nifty and we haven't seen it." On that note, Nolan should do that and net himself some awards. Just saying.

Well even though I was a bit harsher on the winner than I actually would be if I was describing it to someone (that'd be not as much fun), this was a pretty great year. In other news, I did successfully find a watchable copy of Utvandrarna about 2 hours after I broke the rules and printed my blog about how I'd never find it. Isn't that always the way? So I'll try to watch that before I finish 1970 and then insert the review into the 1972 write-up, to have the illusion of continuity. Either way, 1970 will be closing out an overall pretty great decade of films and it will include a film that's sillier than its own spoof, a film that's not as good as its own spinoff, and a film that's less realistic than the real life clichés it bases itself on. Excited?