Get it? Dirty numerical humor! I couldn't resist. Sadly that title is probably more exciting than most of this year's nominees. Not a great way to start off the 60s people. Come on now. The winner is good, one of the nominees is better, and the other 3 range from "meh" to "escapist fun meh." It also contains the only X-rated Best Picture winner ever and the shortest title of any nominee ever. I share this information so that I don't know it for nothing, just almost nothing since anyone who cares can also consult Wikipedia and IMDB.
Anyway, this first movie wasn't terrible and it wasn't great: Anne of the Thousand Days. It was pretty much about Anne Boleyn and how she got killed and yadda yadda. Obviously this wasn't the case for viewers in 1969, but for me this was like watching seasons 1 and 2 of The Tudors trimmed wayyyyyyyyyyy down. And though I can't fault them for failing to live up to a show that began airing 38 years later, I can still fault them for portraying a fascinating story from history as a boring costume drama. Oh and by the way, "costume drama" is pretty much in the same league as "period piece" in that it's code for "the only thing that separates this movie from other movies is that the costumes are spiffy and it takes place a long time ago." King Henry is just kind of there. He's not a bloodthirsty villain or a tortured leader. If anything he's just annoyed at the fact that he has to put people to death. When, in fact, it was his personal fury and jealousy that led to this. I also would have left his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, out of the film entirely. Because her story is largely underdeveloped and the main story suffers because of it. They should have mentioned Catherine for some context, maybe even shown her in flashback or something, but her "character" was a distraction. The actress who portrayed Anne was good but I didn't care for her characterization either. Not to say that she deserved what she got, because I don't think she did, but she was a harpie. She had an agenda and she lied to her husband (who also happened to be the King, not a wise choice). The movie largely portrays her as an innocent little girl who gets plucked from home to be the King's wife and then unjustly executed because the King felt like using her as a scapegoat of sorts. That's like saying that the Cherokee were a peaceful people who never did anything bad to anybody and then the without-a-semblance-of-humanity-or-gray-area white people killed them and cast them out. Is the gist of what I said true? Yeah. But it's more complicated than that. Even if a group of people or an individual person were definitely screwed over at some point in History that doesn't mean you should pretend they were better than they were. And after painting Anne as a somewhat sympathetic character (which is fine, as long as you include the flipside) they just kind of killed her at the end. No speech before the beheading or anything. On The Tudors Anne gives a very passionate speech that makes you feel pity for her after you spent a good portion of the show disliking her (while still thinking she was really hot). But in the movie it's just the execution and then the next scene is Henry saying, "off to the Seymour estate!" as he goes to find his third ill-fated wife. Kind of goofy for an ending to a fairly somber film. But whatever.
An entirely better film that I would have picked as the winner for this year is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Just going on the title, how could you not like it? Best. Cowboy names. Ever. This is an interesting movie because it simultaneously romanticizes the idea of the Old West outlaw and portrays it realistically. The outlaws meet a sticky end after some botched criminal operations, but they do it while looking good and fighting people. That's my kind of Western. Of course, the film doesn't even pretend to be based in too many facts. I'm just saying that there are aspects of the story which portray the outlaw life more realistically than most films of its type. It also includes the oddly placed but aesthetically pleasing Oscar winner "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head." It's pretty much got everything you'd want without overdoing it. It's a buddy movie, a Western, an action movie, a comedy, whatever. Of course a lot of people thought the film was too unbalanced to work. If you've seen it you might be wondering why I'm not saying that. Because I do have a history of mentioning such things (like oh, say, in the last paragraph). But it's all about both balance AND establishment early in the film. The funny scenes always have a twinge of darkness behind them and the serious scenes are never too dark. The tone is also established early on in the film; thus keeping it consistent. An example of too much comedy and not enough serious is Transformers 2 (Michael Bay sucks). An example of failure to establish coherent tone early in a film is Pirates 2 (Gore Verbinski does not suck, Disney might though). You can't have fun and enjoyable piratical nonsense right before having characters betraying each other and whatnot. You also can't spend more time on stereotypical and un-funny robots than Optimus Prime. Just saying. Anyway, this movie has one of my favorite endings as it combines all of my favorite things: gallows humor, gunfire, and going out in a blaze of glory. Great stuff. Brightest star in a meh year.
A ludicrous and overblown film that's not totally without merit is Hello Dolly! There are 2 kinds of musicals and this is the type I don't like. Instead of every song forwarding the plot or developing a character (like in Phantom of the Opera, one of my favorite things ever) every song is just an excuse to...sing. That might sound silly but I feel like they made a mediocre 100 minute romantic comedy and added 45 minutes of singing to it. I'm sure the original Broadway show was more enjoyable, because when you're there it's different and you can just have fun, but the movie is goofy. First off, Barbra Streisand frightens me. Always has. Scary-looking, not funny, bad lip-syncher. If she had dubbed her voice into someone else acting that would have been good. Because her singing voice is magnificent. The high point of the film is Walter Matthau's caricatured (and hilarious) performance as a late 19th century miser. If Ebenezer Scrooge was intended as a comical character, it would have been this guy. But the rest of it is filled to the brim with ridiculous old-timey rhetoric (holy cabooses!) and overblown synchronized dance sequences that go on for too long and are about nothing. "Hey! It's sunny outside so we should probably illustrate that with forced rhyming." The movie also includes a young Michael Crawford, the original Phantom on Broadway, which gives me an opportunity for a rant. I dislike Crawford's Phantom even though I really like him elsewhere. If you're a distorted man and you're singing then you shouldn't be singing in the same voice that you would use to belt out "New York, New York." You should sound distorted! That's why I prefer Gerard Butler's Phantom from the recent movie, his voice is clearly not even half as good but it's more appropriate for the character. You can really feel the rage and the pain in his voice. None of that really had anything to do with anything, but then again neither does most of this movie (burn!). I know I'm entering the era of musicals but I hope the rest of them are better than this. Of course, I already like two Best Picture winning musicals of the 60s and I expect to like a third, and I'm iffy on a fourth. All of those identities will be revealed in time (foreshadowing!). But for now I'll just leave it at: this movie is dumb but quasi enjoyable.
A movie that's about as interesting as its title is long is Z. No there wasn't some kind of coding error that deleted an entire word or a typo on my part. That's the title of the movie. It's tied for the record of shortest movie title ever with Fritz Lang's M, a sadly not-nominated movie which is a masterpiece and way better than this drivel. Anyway, this particular movie is a thinly veiled (more like non-existently veiled) dramatization of the right wing political takeover in 1960s Greece. I'm not going to pretend that I know anything about that real life situation at all, so maybe that didn't help. The only clever part of the film is the opening frame where it says "Any resemblance to real events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. It is DELIBERATE." The other 126.8 minutes don't really live up. I appreciate what the filmmakers were trying to say: that History is written by the victors and censorship sometimes attempts to eliminate certain facts from the public eye. In this case: the right wing crazies who killed the president became "heroes" when theirs became the dominant regime and the men who led the investigation became "villains." I also find all of that to be tragic and you could certainly make a compelling, thought-provoking, and great film about it. This is not that film. It's boring, filmed in an uninteresting fashion, and a little too heavy-handed at times. It's also too reliant on its zeitgeist status (vocab word of the week!) to be much of a lasting film. I'm sure it meant a lot to counter-culturists at the time, especially since J. Edgar Hoover said no patriotic American would go to see it, but today it's just kind of dated. And as I said, I don't really know enough about the real story to get into it. Not because of censorship, just because I don't know anything about it. Also: a tragedy in Greece (not a Greek tragedy, it does not fit that trope) shouldn't be an opportunity for American college students to go "whooooooo! Screw Hoover!" I know people are turned on by the idea of "fighting the man" but when it's at the expense of the lives of real people, that's a bit much. I still don't like the movie though. Just saying.
This year's winner and easily second-best film is Midnight Cowboy. I was pleasantly surprised by this film because I thought it was going to be overrated nonsense. As it turned out, it was "better than I expected intentional nonsense." It also had a sad ending, which was an interesting twist on the buddy movie dynamic. In this case the "buddies" are a male prostitute (Jon Voight, who always annoys me) and a third-rate con man (Dustin Hoffman, who for once doesn't annoy me). I think Hoffman is largely underused here because his performance as Ratso Rizzo (best name ever) is basically the heart and soul of the peace. He's the hooker with the heart of gold, whereas Voight's Joe Buck is the hooker with the head of mush. Know what's a great idea when you've got a job in your hometown? Dressing up like a ridiculous cowboy gigolo and moving to New York to hustle old rich ladies (side note: this is my backup plan if employment eludes me). But whereas this could have been Rocky for male prostitutes (or a sort of "Pilgrim's Progress for Perverts") it instead ends up having a lot of heart. Buck is an old-fashioned country boy who's a bit too polite to make it in the big city doing much of anything, let alone spinsters. And whereas Ratso initially takes advantage of Joe by scamming him out of some money, he ends up forming an unlikely bond with him (even unlikely by the standard of the standard "unlikely bond"). Joe needs Ratso to help him survive in the unforgiving big city and Ratso needs Joe to remind him that somewhere there are people who aren't quite so terrible as everyone else he knows. The film is also surprisingly well-directed. Its tones are very atmospheric and not quite as dated as I thought they might be. It also uses flashbacks incredibly well by having Joe's memories shown sparsely and in a somewhat incomplete manner. I feel like if you're actually haunted by a singular occurrence in your life then you'd keep replaying the same bit of it over and over, while only remembering small pieces of the rest of it. That's how real memory works and that's how it's shown in this movie. So I was really impressed with that because it was ahead of its time in some ways. Other than that it's a fairly straightforward and enjoyable movie. It's also the only X-rated film to ever win Best Picture (although it was re-rated R a few years later). Why Showgirls didn't become the second is anyone's guess.
Well I guess that 60s could have started off worse. And some good things lay ahead so I anticipate some interesting posts ahead. I feel like the 50s won't have as much ammo for me though, just because of the style and the lack of "out there" movies. So the 60s could in some ways be my last hurrah. But I'm getting ahead of myself. All I'll think about for now is that the next year will include more costume drama, more Streisand, and another musical with a superfluously placed exclamation mark.
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