I actually don't watch Gossip Girl and have never seen it so I suppose I can't be using it too effectively as a means to make fun of stuff. But what I do know is that I'd probably intensely dislike all the melodrama, but it'd possibly be worth it to ogle Blake Lively. If my unemployment ever reaches a staggering second year, I'll watch the full run of the show and make a lot of subsequent jokes about myself. But for now, we'll have to settle with the 3(!) melodramas from this year to make fun of. Luckily I'm a big fan of the winner, so it's not all negative.
We begin with Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing. Do I normally capitalize words like "is" and "a?" I'm not certain...it's kind of bothering me. Like, a lot. I'm just that way. It's going to be tough writing about these because I have the exact same complaints about all three of them and I'd like to parcel it out beforehand but I've never done an outline for a research paper (let alone a blog entry). And before you ask: yes I got all As on my research papers. Past a certain point in my education cycle anyway. Okay...so the movie. It's about two ill-fated lovers. One of whom is in the military and one of whom is half-Asian. And it's the era when that love would be looked down upon anyway, but certainly during the aftermath years of World War II. And one of them is a widow and one of them is still married or something...I forget. Yes, he's married (I've just remembered without Wikipedia, I'm proud of myself). Because he asks her out and she's like "aren't you married?" and he's all "so?" and she goes "tee hee!" Then before you know it, they're both willing to spit in the face of societal norms and put themselves in possibly actual physical danger by being together. There must have been some seriously X-Rated banging going on off-screen because all we see them do is have tea like once and then they're madly in love. And there's my sole complaint of all of these types of films. They never sell the romance. They go right from barely knowing each other to moving heaven and earth to be together in about the time it'd take you to check the movie's IMDB Trivia section (true story). It should take most of the movie for them to get together, or they should already be together at the beginning. If I were to apply the same level of development to a crime drama: Michael Corleone would kill the heads of the five families because one of them stepped on his shoe once. It's jumping straight into the plot where the movie needs to go without having sufficient reason to be there. Especially when you've got things like racial tension going on, you REALLY have to have some good reasons for the two to be a couple. Beyond the reason that they're both attractive. Plenty of attractive people out there. And I'm not super sure who Jennifer Jones is/was/whatever but she was definitely hot enough to snag whoever. Just saying. Then he goes to war and dies. So they put them together for no reason, tore them apart for no reason, and I'm sure everyone ate it up and loved it because it was at least more drama than they were getting on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. In closing: good performances. Great music. Not much to work with though.
A flawed but certainly much better film is Mister Roberts. It sounds like the heartwarming tale of an old curmudgeon who befriends his young next door neighbor, thus revealing his inner humanity, and then dies having let go of the pains of his past. But it's not. I wish I still had the Netflix slip cover with the plot description, because it was absurdly inaccurate. It said it was a heartwarming movie about the triumph of blah blah or something. It's actually a fairly serious movie with comedic undertones. Very much like most stage plays, and it is unsurprisingly based on one. Stage plays always try to make people laugh, even if it's way dark, because a laughing audience is an engaged audience. It's a bit of an odd movie because it has two directors, one of whom is John Ford, and Jimmy Cagney is the bad guy but it's sort of a comedic role. It's lost in the space between comedy in drama. It's kind of in that awkward 90th minute stage that most comedies nowadays hit where things get all dramatic, except that's the whole movie. It's definitely good though. With Cagney and Henry Fonda and the rest of the cast it would have been tough to screw up. It's the usual story: the commander of the ship is a bit crazy and so the hero of the movie has to stand up to him while simultaneously keeping the crew in line. I added too much detail for it to be a "usual story" but it's actually crazy similar to the 1954 movie I'm watching now (which at least knows it's a drama). But the story of the chain of command getting in the way and having the moral quandary of duty vs. "the right thing to do" was even old in 1955. Not to say that makes the movie bad or not enjoyable or poorly written. Because it's not. Although it is a bit too long for what it is, I will say that. But it's a bit like watching a good episode of Law and Order. It's enjoyable and you don't expect much from it. But if it suddenly got nominated for an Emmy for that episode you'd say "wait...what?" 1955 seems like a dull year. Even the winner, which I quite like, is a small and cute movie. Maybe with all the gravitas of 1954's winner and quite possibly some of the other nominees (we'll see) they wanted some fodder this year. I don't know. But there's not much more I can really say, other than that if you see this movie on TV then give it a watch. It's a good way to spend your time, even if it's not the best way.
Continuing with the melodrama is Picnic. At least Kim Novak was a hottie. I was already a fan of hers from Vertigo (a FANTASTIC movie that is brilliantly directed by Hitchcock. See it anywhere on my blog as a nominee? No? It was among the first films to be Dark Knight-ed). The whole movie is basically a big picnic, as the title would suggest, and the various melodramatic goings-on. There's the young girl looking to break free from her family, the middle-aged woman who can't let go of the past, the older dude who's lonely for whatever reason, blah blah. They essentially have a character for everyone in the audience to empathize with. Not "recognize with" mind you, as that would be the quite incorrect way to phrase that (contrary to my previous posts). But the whole thing is so pointless. Because you know where a lot of it is going and all of the acting is so over-the-top and soap opera esque. Not to say the actors in it are bad in other things because they're not. But Academy Award winner Frances McDormand was in Transformers 3 and she was really stupid in it. It happens. Wikipedia says it was praised at the time for being a richly detailed snapshot of the Midwest in the 50s. Well I sincerely hope that they just mean in terms of atmosphere and not in terms of character archetypes. Although they probably mean both in some ways. I'll admit that it's difficult for me to tell what the film's intentions are with regards to certain characters. So I don't know if it's trying to be ironic at times or if it is actually meant to be taken seriously. Because since there's such a gap in my mind between societal norms today and societal norms back then, it's basically impossible for me to view it within the intended contexts. Which is the mark of a not great movie in many cases. There should be more to a film than just zeitgeist and angst. Zeitgeist and angst is another possible title for my autobiography, I'll write that down. Anyway, the most ridiculous point comes at the end when Kim Novak (who's playing an 18-year-old I think) decides to run off with William Holden (who's older and has been around the block a few times. You know, the euphemism-y kind of block). Her mother tells her something along the lines of: "you know he's just going to cheat on you and toss you aside when he gets bored!" To which she replies: "nobody's perfect mother!" When Billy Wilder ended his brilliant Some Like It Hot with that same line (sans mother) it's hilarious. Because it's so absurd. But this is played COMPLETELY seriously. So I'm sitting there thinking to myself: "this is the happy ending to the movie? The teenage girl running off with a dude who she reasonably expects might cheat on her?" So what's the point of all that? Don't know. Don't really care. I give them points for helping to move the cinemascope format forward (which was new at the time) but it's a bit of an odd movie for it. Just saying.
A slightly-better-but-still-melodramatic movie is The Rose Tattoo. What's with these titles? Tattoos and picnics and off-brand Mr. Rogers. They sound even more boring than the movies actually are, which is impressive. This one is about an old Italian lady dealing with the death of her husband and being really restrictive of her younger daughter, who is trying to live a life of her own. See a trend here? It's not even the 60s and there's been a whole lot of moonbeam-y mess. Somebody can't let go of the past, somebody else can't grasp the future, and I'm sure somebody had present issues too. Probably all of them, elsewise it would've been a strange 2001 precursor. So the old Italian lady's husband dies in an accident. Then she finds out he had been cheating on her. Then she becomes a misanthrope and prevents her daughter from living her life. Then she changes her mind after some scenery gets devoured and everybody is happy at the end. And somewhere in there are two tattoos of roses on various people and I'm sure they represent something profound like life or anti-monasticism or something. I remember reading somewhere, and I wish I could remember where, that people really took to the movie because they had never seen breasts as big as Anna Magnani's before (she's the middle-aged biddy). Really? Really 1950s? This does support my theory for why Titanic won so many awards and why it made so much money, but the 50s is supposed to be better than that. And it's not like there were a bunch of terrible looking women in movies back then. They were classy, top-of-the-line hotties and great actresses. I'd take a 30s-50s starlet over any actress today any day of the week (except Annie from Community). The movie is a little too serious if you ask me. If you don't balance out the serious with some humor then the whole thing becomes melodrama. For instance, other films that I enjoy which also feature the same few people bickering in a few rooms for two hours are Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Lion in Winter. In the latter, there are actual things at stake so that helps. But in the former there's basically nothing at stake. It's still really good. Because it's funny at times, and the acting is better, and the writing is better, and everything is better. It balances itself out well. The scenes have some variety. I think that's what gets to me the most. Films like Tattoo seem to consist of the same two conversations over and over again. It might as well just be "can I?" "No!" "Can I?" "No!" (final two minutes) "Can I?" "Well, okay. Molto bene!" Cue credits. They consist of two characters having the same prolonged conversation and one of them finally giving up. There's more to it of course, but nothing particularly interesting.
Thankfully, this year's winner is our savior: Marty. Now here is a great movie that happens to be about basically nothing. It has no major consequences and doesn't concern anything too important. But it's really excellent, and also the shortest movie ever to win Best Picture I might add. I can't stress enough how great that is. In today's movies (and even starting in the 60s) when he decides to go call the girl after all there would be 40 more minutes of movie with more canned drama. But instead it leaves us with the idea that they'll live happily ever after and that's PLENTY. No need to overstay your welcome. As Jonathan Swift once said, "I apologize for the length of this letter. I didn't have the time to write a short one." I love that. Not that I follow that particular philosophy on my blog of course (although in some ways I do). But if I was making a movie or show, I absolutely would. The movie is also very funny. It captures the type of nonsensical dialogue of guys sitting around deciding what to do. They basically talk about nothing and keep repeating the same nothing. Paddy Chayefsky really nailed it with the dialogue. And then Marty, who gets grief from everybody about when he's going to get married, finally has a nice time with a lovely woman who other people just label "a dog." But as he says at the end, "I had a nice time! Who cares what she looks like? I think she's beautiful and I had a great time last night!" See, the film deals with some very recognizable issues but it doesn't shove them in your face. You instantly recognize the point being made without the movie telling you straight out. Because everyone has experienced situations where people give you advice about things and you discover that you should really just decide things for yourself. Or situations where you realize that the people you're hanging around with are no good and it's time for a change. His life is filled with guys talking about nothing and old Italian ladies talking about how everything sucks and everybody's dead that they knew. But they manage to make it hilarious! There are undertones of seriousness but it's truly funny. I'd call it a "delightful" film. That's the exact word I'd use. For what it is, they couldn't have made it any better.
Well I'm looking down the list of 1954 nominees and it's already more interesting just from the titles alone. So I hope it won't let me down. Because this year was just a complete mess. Peyton Place times 3 basically. The winner for '54 is already one of my favorites of all time, so it's already a better year. Hopefully the rest of the year will follow suit. All I know for now is that it will contain seven weddings, three bachelorettes, and one failed contender.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Quick Rant: "Historical Accuracy" in Fiction and Why It's Stupid
I was thinking about writing a Facebook note today about this very subject, but then I thought: why not share it with the whole world? Or at least the quark of a percentage of it that reads the blog. The concept I'll be addressing today is not just historical accuracy but some aspects of "realism" in general that some internet people like to attack. So I hope you enjoy the visual sound of my voice as much as I do.
Right then, I'll start by talking about an aspect of fiction that I always keep in mind but that few others do. What you're watching isn't our world. No matter how much it looks like our world or tries to feel like our world, it isn't. Now of course you're sitting there and thinking "umm...this is true..." and wondering if I've finally lost my tenuous grip on reality. Everyone knows it's not our world because they're watching it on TV or on a movie screen, but they don't really think about all the implications that go along with that knowledge. And I'll use an unusual example: The Office. People have complained because the characters often go to Chili's to eat (and for the Dundies) but there apparently is not a Chili's in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Know what else isn't really in Scranton? Dunder Mifflin. And you can search far and wide for Toby Flenderson, H.R. Representative for Dunder Mifflin Scranton but I guarantee you won't find him. Because he doesn't exist. But what else does that mean? It means that his parents don't exist either. In fact, every single person in his bloodline from today and back to the beginning of time is an implied fictional character. Which means that the world of the show is probably at least a little different from ours, since there are thousands of people in it stretching throughout history who never existed in our world. And they all interacted with the world around them and changed it. That's just Toby's lineage. Add to that the histories of every other character on The Office that has ever been, whether they be regular, recurring, guests, or just extras. Add to that characters who are mentioned but never seen, such as the founding members of Dunder Mifflin (although we did meet one of them) and Michael's former boss who died off-screen in one episode. Every single one of those people adds thousands of ancestors to the world's history. Which would make their world pretty freaking different from ours. So is it not possible that at some point one of those people butterfly effect-ed a Chili's into Scranton, Pennsylvania?
As Neo would say: whoa.
Now, obviously none of this was in the minds of the people involved with the show (except maybe Rainn Wilson). But it speaks to a lot of common complaints that people have about a lot of shows and they always annoy me. All that matters is continuity within the show itself. There was a similar complaint during 24 that the D.C. Metro station didn't look like the actual one in real life. My snarky answer to that is: really? They couldn't halt transportation in the most important city in the world for a whole day to film two scenes of a TV show? Shocking. But if you take into account what I just explained then it means even more here. After all, not only are there a lot of major world events on 24 that never happened in real life, but there are also a lot more characters from a lot more countries. This fundamentally changes a ton about that fictional universe to set it aside from ours. So I'd say the Metro can look different and it makes sense. As I said, what matters is the continuity within the show or movie. I would hope that their version of the D.C. Metro looks the same from episode to episode. Did Hitler really die the way he did in Inglourious Basterds? Obviously not. Could he have been if the Basterds had existed? I'd say yeah.
That brings me to the historical aspect of things. I don't think they should soil a good man's name needlessly so I wouldn't be a fan of a portrayal of Abe Lincoln as a pedophile since there's obviously no evidence to support this. But if you can look at a person a few different ways or interpret their actions to suit the artistic vision of your movie, I say go for it. And putting more emphasis on the style of dress of the time or the types of teacups they used rather than on the story itself is crazy. Both would be nice, but if I had to pick one I'd pick the story. I also think we should be free to make things like Inglourious Basterds which completely just change things and go for it. Because honestly, if you believe the events of the movie then I think your mental state is more a danger to the country than the movie is. And for me, it's the equivalent of someone in 2051 watching the caricatured version of President Bush in Transformers and then saying "but wait a second! He was a real President but I can't find anything in my school textbook about these Decepticons!" None of it is real and thus the filmmakers should have some freedom. Movies like Schindler's List are obvious exceptions, since it is intended to educate as well as tell a story. But if all you're doing is spinning an artistic yarn, you should be able to do so to the best of your ability without people whining about how many buttons are on Union Soldier Number 6's waistcoat.
In case you couldn't tell, I dislike people on the internet who make comments about stuff. But I think this shows that I spend more time thinking about a great many things than they do. So if you hear someone complaining about a great show like The Sopranos because the real Satriale's Deli has a bigger selection than the one on the show, I'd be happy to rant to them in person.
Right then, I'll start by talking about an aspect of fiction that I always keep in mind but that few others do. What you're watching isn't our world. No matter how much it looks like our world or tries to feel like our world, it isn't. Now of course you're sitting there and thinking "umm...this is true..." and wondering if I've finally lost my tenuous grip on reality. Everyone knows it's not our world because they're watching it on TV or on a movie screen, but they don't really think about all the implications that go along with that knowledge. And I'll use an unusual example: The Office. People have complained because the characters often go to Chili's to eat (and for the Dundies) but there apparently is not a Chili's in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Know what else isn't really in Scranton? Dunder Mifflin. And you can search far and wide for Toby Flenderson, H.R. Representative for Dunder Mifflin Scranton but I guarantee you won't find him. Because he doesn't exist. But what else does that mean? It means that his parents don't exist either. In fact, every single person in his bloodline from today and back to the beginning of time is an implied fictional character. Which means that the world of the show is probably at least a little different from ours, since there are thousands of people in it stretching throughout history who never existed in our world. And they all interacted with the world around them and changed it. That's just Toby's lineage. Add to that the histories of every other character on The Office that has ever been, whether they be regular, recurring, guests, or just extras. Add to that characters who are mentioned but never seen, such as the founding members of Dunder Mifflin (although we did meet one of them) and Michael's former boss who died off-screen in one episode. Every single one of those people adds thousands of ancestors to the world's history. Which would make their world pretty freaking different from ours. So is it not possible that at some point one of those people butterfly effect-ed a Chili's into Scranton, Pennsylvania?
As Neo would say: whoa.
Now, obviously none of this was in the minds of the people involved with the show (except maybe Rainn Wilson). But it speaks to a lot of common complaints that people have about a lot of shows and they always annoy me. All that matters is continuity within the show itself. There was a similar complaint during 24 that the D.C. Metro station didn't look like the actual one in real life. My snarky answer to that is: really? They couldn't halt transportation in the most important city in the world for a whole day to film two scenes of a TV show? Shocking. But if you take into account what I just explained then it means even more here. After all, not only are there a lot of major world events on 24 that never happened in real life, but there are also a lot more characters from a lot more countries. This fundamentally changes a ton about that fictional universe to set it aside from ours. So I'd say the Metro can look different and it makes sense. As I said, what matters is the continuity within the show or movie. I would hope that their version of the D.C. Metro looks the same from episode to episode. Did Hitler really die the way he did in Inglourious Basterds? Obviously not. Could he have been if the Basterds had existed? I'd say yeah.
That brings me to the historical aspect of things. I don't think they should soil a good man's name needlessly so I wouldn't be a fan of a portrayal of Abe Lincoln as a pedophile since there's obviously no evidence to support this. But if you can look at a person a few different ways or interpret their actions to suit the artistic vision of your movie, I say go for it. And putting more emphasis on the style of dress of the time or the types of teacups they used rather than on the story itself is crazy. Both would be nice, but if I had to pick one I'd pick the story. I also think we should be free to make things like Inglourious Basterds which completely just change things and go for it. Because honestly, if you believe the events of the movie then I think your mental state is more a danger to the country than the movie is. And for me, it's the equivalent of someone in 2051 watching the caricatured version of President Bush in Transformers and then saying "but wait a second! He was a real President but I can't find anything in my school textbook about these Decepticons!" None of it is real and thus the filmmakers should have some freedom. Movies like Schindler's List are obvious exceptions, since it is intended to educate as well as tell a story. But if all you're doing is spinning an artistic yarn, you should be able to do so to the best of your ability without people whining about how many buttons are on Union Soldier Number 6's waistcoat.
In case you couldn't tell, I dislike people on the internet who make comments about stuff. But I think this shows that I spend more time thinking about a great many things than they do. So if you hear someone complaining about a great show like The Sopranos because the real Satriale's Deli has a bigger selection than the one on the show, I'd be happy to rant to them in person.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
1956: The Year that The King of Siam Let Moses' People Go
Now this was a pretty fun year! I hope my exclamation point doesn't imply that I enjoyed all of the nominees for this year. I don't think I have yet enjoyed all of a year's nominees and I certainly won't be starting with this one. But how about 2 1/2 out of 5? And actually since three of the nominees were over 3 hours long then that's not too bad! Of course, Netflix still cut off the last 15 seconds of one of them...some of us watch the credits Netflix! They've been sending me a lot of full screen stuff too lately. Know who shares my disdain? Roger Ebert. I haven't been in company this good since I learned that Quentin Tarantino is the second person after me who really likes Superman Returns. But I blather. Let's lovingly and brutally make hyperbolic jokes about good movies.
And also some bad ones, as always, which this time around is Friendly Persuasion. This was kind of a mess. My dad said so too and he usually lauds almost everything from this era. The premise is actually fairly interesting. It's about how a pacifist Quaker family copes with the Civil War and how they eventually support it. Sounds interesting right? Well like so many things, the real thing isn't what you thought it would be. And the suggestion of the idea is more fascinating than the idea itself. This was apparently Ronald Reagan's favorite movie and he loaned a copy to Gorbachev in the waning days of the Cold War. And this helped our cause for some reason. If it was me, I'd have loaned him Poltergeist II and said "tear down this wall or we'll make another one of these!" I was somewhat surprised to see that this was directed by William Wyler, a man who so expertly crafted Ben-Hur and several other Best Picture winners that I'll watch further down the road. It's instead directed with the type of silliness mixed with seriousness that John Ford used. Except it's not balanced as well as he did in say...The Searchers (WHICH came out in this year and was not nominated, one of the Academy's most egregious errors). I mean, it's a movie about people who are forced to rethink their entire philosophy after a series of harrowing events and the first scene in the movie depicts a quasi-anthropomorphic goose chasing a little kid around a farm. In fact, most of the film is spent sitting around being inane. And while you know that the Confederate army is drawing ever closer, and that adds an element of suspense, it doesn't come up enough throughout the film and there's no real payoff. Gary Cooper is the father so you're expecting him to go all Marshall Kane on the Confederates. I think he fights like one dude. His son is the one who joins the war effort, but only very briefly. And he joins up with a whole troup...so it's not like he really had to shoot at people. Instead of the film's message being "sometimes a series of events can be so dangerous and a man can be pushed so far that he will cease being a pacifist and become more warlike to defend his family," it was "even in the 1860s teenagers were rebellious." Seriously. The kid seemed like he wanted to fight because it was what all the cool kids were doing. So yeah, maybe the book does a better job of showing the slow and agonizing decisions that would lead a man to abandon his faith. But this didn't.
Thankfully I'm a little more positive about Giant. Although I just wish it wasn't like 3 hours and 20 minutes long. I was NOT expecting it to be that long at all. I thought it was an Instant Watch glitch. James Dean's other 2 films (which are WAY better I might add) are a respectable length and they're each appropriately dark. But you know what this reminded me of? Brace yourself: the fourth Harry Potter movie. Because both are trying to fit entirely too much material into a smaller time frame than it needs. You'd think over 3 hours would be enough time but there's no real flow. I can respect that they wanted to incorporate as much of the book as they could, and the book covers several generations of an oil baron family. Whereas in HP all you needed was an extra 15-20 minutes tops to fix the pacing problem, this should have been a miniseries. Or they could have just made the focus more on the characters and less on the overall story. Because no one really cares about a family that makes a bunch of money on oil and ends up owning an empire. What they care about is the personal toll that having such an empire takes on the people. What are the moral implications? Are they fully aware of said implications? Instead what we got was basically a series of vignettes showing the progress of the family over time. And James Dean does a fantastic job but he isn't in it nearly enough. On a side note: he didn't win the Oscar! The man was dead! It was his last chance! Jerks. His character is easily the best in the film, and even though they cast him as a villain the only villainous thing he seemed to do was lust after Rock Hudson's wife. The wife happened to be played by Elizabeth Taylor, the eternal hottie. If Mr. Dean wasn't attracted to her then there's something wrong with the continuity. Plus, all he does is call her pretty and stuff. He wasn't a jerk about it...but whatever. I liked the incorporation of anthems into the music score, but even my dad yelled down from upstairs: "how many times do they have to play 'the yellow rose of Texas?'" Almost as over-used as "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in 2001. Anyway, this is a well-filmed movie with great actors but they used some cinematic scatter shot when they should have focused on just a few stories.
A thankfully much better-flowing film is The King and I. This is a highly charming picture. I thought I was going to spend this entire write-up making jokes about how Russian-born Yul Brynner was playing an Asian king...but you know what? He actually looked the part. Normally with these things from this era, it's all too obvious that it's a white guy with tan makeup. But he looked the part, acted the part, and sang the part. I have absolutely no clue how. He had realistic mannerisms and everything. Sooooooooooo ahead of its time. Seriously. Normally performances like this from way back then are really dated and kind of take you out of it. Side note: at one point in the movie he starts talking about Moses, and he played Pharaoh in another nominee this year. Side side note: pharaoh is the most obnoxious word to spell, ever. This film has to work at its romance quite a bit more than other musicals of the time. Because instead of My Fair Lady where it's "we have to make you believe that someone would fall in love with Audrey Hepburn" this is more like "we have to make you believe that Deborah Kerr would fall for a crazy Asian monarch dude with like 600 bastard children." Way tougher. His performance is unexpectedly quirky and charming though. I laughed quite a bit more than I thought I would. And the songs aren't quite as superfluous as many other musicals of the time. In fact, I think the dialogue is a lot better than the song lyrics. Usually I'm just waiting for the musical numbers but this was quite the opposite. Now, I know I just said James Dean should've won but Yul Brynner definitely earned every bit of this Oscar. Which is why James Dean should've been nominated for Supporting Actor. He was a supporting character in that film, so why put him up against Brynner? I have no idea. Anyway, it's also refreshing that a lot of side characters and extras are actual Asians instead of just painted white people. It makes the scenes believable and not ridiculous, unlike a certain Elizabeth Taylor Egyptian fiasco. It's also unexpectedly sad at the end, which makes the film far more powerful and meaningful than its blue skies contemporaries. So a highly pleasant surprise overall. And Deborah Kerr was a hottie. Had to fit that in there.
If you liked Yul as a Siamese then you'll love him as an Egyptian in The Ten Commandments. If only he were in it more. Okay, here comes the film snobbery. I try to have a good balance of "hmm that's interesting cinematography" and "I enjoyed the attractive women and explosions" in my reviews. Because if you're just in one of those camps, you're missing out. But I get really snobby when something could've been so good and ended up being a mixed bag due to fixable mistakes. There were like four screenwriters and I felt like two of them were probably really good and two sucked. Because there are a lot of great scenes and great lines and also a lot of silly stuff. Okay, let's break it down. The film is shot in 1.85:1 (similar to HDTV shows today, widescreen but not super wide). This is a mistake. Films of an epic nature should be shot as widely as possible to give a sense of the grand scale (see: Lawrence of Arabia). Not only does it downplay some of the more grand scenes, the camera is too close to the people and the costumes and weapons look fake at times. Then there's the rear-screen projection. I'm a big fan of this filming trick. But here's a question: if you obviously filmed a scene actually in the hills nearby actual sheep, then why is there a dialogue scene right before it that's in front of a previously filmed scene of sheep and hills? They're obviously on a stage and it takes you out of the moment. But they were on location! Why not film those scenes outside like the others? And when Moses is revealing this massive statue construction to his father, it's also the two of them looking at a screen. There was no CGI back then so they clearly filmed actual actors doing the constructing. So why not film the Moses scene at the same location? Instead it just looks ludicrous, which is unfortunate because it could have been quite grand. The film makes other mistakes but I'll not mention them here. It's a real shame, because this was when stories from the Bible started to peter out. Whatever your religious affiliations, there are some truly great and epic stories in the Bible. You could make some crazy and gritty movies about it with blood and guts and boobs and all sorts of things. But nobody wants to anymore, so this was most of what we get. Certainly some moving scenes and I'm still a fan of most of the film but it could have been a lot more than it was.
Which brings us to a similar case, this year's winner: Around the World in 80 Days. This is kind of a fluff movie, but it's good fluff. They went on location for all of their scenes and there are some truly breathtaking shots. But here again: it could've been so much more. It spends too much time winking at the audience with all of its cameos and that dilutes the main characters to some extent. And one of the main guys is supposed to be French and played by a Mexican dude...talk about all the Mexican characters played by white guys and all this time there was a Mexican actor and they have him play a white guy? Love them 50s. Still, I enjoyed most of the film. I didn't like that at the end they had some canned drama that almost prevented him from winning, and he basically cheated to win too. Because they gained a day by crossing the international date line. So even though he arrived exactly 80 days later at the same spot, it took him 81 days. Get it? Cheater! But that's not a huge deal I guess, since the movie isn't totally serious. That's my only major qualm, aside from the fact that the only character motivation is: "I'm a rich British guy and in order to become richer I'm going around the world in 80 days for fun." I haven't read the book, but I would hope there's some more motivation there. That he needs the prize money, that he's in a race, etc. Something! But there are mostly positives about the film. It's a lot of fun and even though it's 3 hours long it keeps things fresh enough by moving around the world that it doesn't get dull. And the end credits are an awesome little short film all their own, definitely worth sitting through. I also like that it incorporated national anthems into its musical score. Britain's "theme music" never sounded so good. I thought it was odd that of all the American music to pick they picked "Yankee Doodle Dandy" though...and they have the "Mexican Hat Dance" for Mexico too. For the Mexican actor playing a Frenchman. Let that sink in. Of course, Moses in the other movie was basically a Gentile playing a Jew playing an Egyptian. So whatever. Oh! I've just remembered that this movie also began with an intro from Edward R. Murrow and clips from Georges Méliés A Trip to the Moon which was one of the first real movies. And YES I have seen it in its entirety. I'm legit. While this was cool and would have been cool before the movie, I don't like that it's officially part of the film. Because I'm a purist. And a film douche at times. Shirley Maclaine was a hottie in this. There you go. I'm dialing it back.
Well that year had some variety anyway. I like to make fun of different things instead of just complaining about British people prattling on all the time. I was a little harsher on some of these than I perhaps meant to be, and I liked them a lot more than I let on. But I criticize because I love. Someday I'll make a movie about Moses where he goes back and kills all the people that helped him out for 40 years (look it up, it's in the Good Book), thus making a lot of money off of controversy. And if a movie is 3 hours and 40 minutes and at least 2 1/2 hours are good then I guess that's okay. I can only hope that 1955 is as interesting. But somehow I don't think so. All I know for now is that it will include tattooed melodrama, picnicking melodrama, and interracial melodrama. Scandalous!
And also some bad ones, as always, which this time around is Friendly Persuasion. This was kind of a mess. My dad said so too and he usually lauds almost everything from this era. The premise is actually fairly interesting. It's about how a pacifist Quaker family copes with the Civil War and how they eventually support it. Sounds interesting right? Well like so many things, the real thing isn't what you thought it would be. And the suggestion of the idea is more fascinating than the idea itself. This was apparently Ronald Reagan's favorite movie and he loaned a copy to Gorbachev in the waning days of the Cold War. And this helped our cause for some reason. If it was me, I'd have loaned him Poltergeist II and said "tear down this wall or we'll make another one of these!" I was somewhat surprised to see that this was directed by William Wyler, a man who so expertly crafted Ben-Hur and several other Best Picture winners that I'll watch further down the road. It's instead directed with the type of silliness mixed with seriousness that John Ford used. Except it's not balanced as well as he did in say...The Searchers (WHICH came out in this year and was not nominated, one of the Academy's most egregious errors). I mean, it's a movie about people who are forced to rethink their entire philosophy after a series of harrowing events and the first scene in the movie depicts a quasi-anthropomorphic goose chasing a little kid around a farm. In fact, most of the film is spent sitting around being inane. And while you know that the Confederate army is drawing ever closer, and that adds an element of suspense, it doesn't come up enough throughout the film and there's no real payoff. Gary Cooper is the father so you're expecting him to go all Marshall Kane on the Confederates. I think he fights like one dude. His son is the one who joins the war effort, but only very briefly. And he joins up with a whole troup...so it's not like he really had to shoot at people. Instead of the film's message being "sometimes a series of events can be so dangerous and a man can be pushed so far that he will cease being a pacifist and become more warlike to defend his family," it was "even in the 1860s teenagers were rebellious." Seriously. The kid seemed like he wanted to fight because it was what all the cool kids were doing. So yeah, maybe the book does a better job of showing the slow and agonizing decisions that would lead a man to abandon his faith. But this didn't.
Thankfully I'm a little more positive about Giant. Although I just wish it wasn't like 3 hours and 20 minutes long. I was NOT expecting it to be that long at all. I thought it was an Instant Watch glitch. James Dean's other 2 films (which are WAY better I might add) are a respectable length and they're each appropriately dark. But you know what this reminded me of? Brace yourself: the fourth Harry Potter movie. Because both are trying to fit entirely too much material into a smaller time frame than it needs. You'd think over 3 hours would be enough time but there's no real flow. I can respect that they wanted to incorporate as much of the book as they could, and the book covers several generations of an oil baron family. Whereas in HP all you needed was an extra 15-20 minutes tops to fix the pacing problem, this should have been a miniseries. Or they could have just made the focus more on the characters and less on the overall story. Because no one really cares about a family that makes a bunch of money on oil and ends up owning an empire. What they care about is the personal toll that having such an empire takes on the people. What are the moral implications? Are they fully aware of said implications? Instead what we got was basically a series of vignettes showing the progress of the family over time. And James Dean does a fantastic job but he isn't in it nearly enough. On a side note: he didn't win the Oscar! The man was dead! It was his last chance! Jerks. His character is easily the best in the film, and even though they cast him as a villain the only villainous thing he seemed to do was lust after Rock Hudson's wife. The wife happened to be played by Elizabeth Taylor, the eternal hottie. If Mr. Dean wasn't attracted to her then there's something wrong with the continuity. Plus, all he does is call her pretty and stuff. He wasn't a jerk about it...but whatever. I liked the incorporation of anthems into the music score, but even my dad yelled down from upstairs: "how many times do they have to play 'the yellow rose of Texas?'" Almost as over-used as "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in 2001. Anyway, this is a well-filmed movie with great actors but they used some cinematic scatter shot when they should have focused on just a few stories.
A thankfully much better-flowing film is The King and I. This is a highly charming picture. I thought I was going to spend this entire write-up making jokes about how Russian-born Yul Brynner was playing an Asian king...but you know what? He actually looked the part. Normally with these things from this era, it's all too obvious that it's a white guy with tan makeup. But he looked the part, acted the part, and sang the part. I have absolutely no clue how. He had realistic mannerisms and everything. Sooooooooooo ahead of its time. Seriously. Normally performances like this from way back then are really dated and kind of take you out of it. Side note: at one point in the movie he starts talking about Moses, and he played Pharaoh in another nominee this year. Side side note: pharaoh is the most obnoxious word to spell, ever. This film has to work at its romance quite a bit more than other musicals of the time. Because instead of My Fair Lady where it's "we have to make you believe that someone would fall in love with Audrey Hepburn" this is more like "we have to make you believe that Deborah Kerr would fall for a crazy Asian monarch dude with like 600 bastard children." Way tougher. His performance is unexpectedly quirky and charming though. I laughed quite a bit more than I thought I would. And the songs aren't quite as superfluous as many other musicals of the time. In fact, I think the dialogue is a lot better than the song lyrics. Usually I'm just waiting for the musical numbers but this was quite the opposite. Now, I know I just said James Dean should've won but Yul Brynner definitely earned every bit of this Oscar. Which is why James Dean should've been nominated for Supporting Actor. He was a supporting character in that film, so why put him up against Brynner? I have no idea. Anyway, it's also refreshing that a lot of side characters and extras are actual Asians instead of just painted white people. It makes the scenes believable and not ridiculous, unlike a certain Elizabeth Taylor Egyptian fiasco. It's also unexpectedly sad at the end, which makes the film far more powerful and meaningful than its blue skies contemporaries. So a highly pleasant surprise overall. And Deborah Kerr was a hottie. Had to fit that in there.
If you liked Yul as a Siamese then you'll love him as an Egyptian in The Ten Commandments. If only he were in it more. Okay, here comes the film snobbery. I try to have a good balance of "hmm that's interesting cinematography" and "I enjoyed the attractive women and explosions" in my reviews. Because if you're just in one of those camps, you're missing out. But I get really snobby when something could've been so good and ended up being a mixed bag due to fixable mistakes. There were like four screenwriters and I felt like two of them were probably really good and two sucked. Because there are a lot of great scenes and great lines and also a lot of silly stuff. Okay, let's break it down. The film is shot in 1.85:1 (similar to HDTV shows today, widescreen but not super wide). This is a mistake. Films of an epic nature should be shot as widely as possible to give a sense of the grand scale (see: Lawrence of Arabia). Not only does it downplay some of the more grand scenes, the camera is too close to the people and the costumes and weapons look fake at times. Then there's the rear-screen projection. I'm a big fan of this filming trick. But here's a question: if you obviously filmed a scene actually in the hills nearby actual sheep, then why is there a dialogue scene right before it that's in front of a previously filmed scene of sheep and hills? They're obviously on a stage and it takes you out of the moment. But they were on location! Why not film those scenes outside like the others? And when Moses is revealing this massive statue construction to his father, it's also the two of them looking at a screen. There was no CGI back then so they clearly filmed actual actors doing the constructing. So why not film the Moses scene at the same location? Instead it just looks ludicrous, which is unfortunate because it could have been quite grand. The film makes other mistakes but I'll not mention them here. It's a real shame, because this was when stories from the Bible started to peter out. Whatever your religious affiliations, there are some truly great and epic stories in the Bible. You could make some crazy and gritty movies about it with blood and guts and boobs and all sorts of things. But nobody wants to anymore, so this was most of what we get. Certainly some moving scenes and I'm still a fan of most of the film but it could have been a lot more than it was.
Which brings us to a similar case, this year's winner: Around the World in 80 Days. This is kind of a fluff movie, but it's good fluff. They went on location for all of their scenes and there are some truly breathtaking shots. But here again: it could've been so much more. It spends too much time winking at the audience with all of its cameos and that dilutes the main characters to some extent. And one of the main guys is supposed to be French and played by a Mexican dude...talk about all the Mexican characters played by white guys and all this time there was a Mexican actor and they have him play a white guy? Love them 50s. Still, I enjoyed most of the film. I didn't like that at the end they had some canned drama that almost prevented him from winning, and he basically cheated to win too. Because they gained a day by crossing the international date line. So even though he arrived exactly 80 days later at the same spot, it took him 81 days. Get it? Cheater! But that's not a huge deal I guess, since the movie isn't totally serious. That's my only major qualm, aside from the fact that the only character motivation is: "I'm a rich British guy and in order to become richer I'm going around the world in 80 days for fun." I haven't read the book, but I would hope there's some more motivation there. That he needs the prize money, that he's in a race, etc. Something! But there are mostly positives about the film. It's a lot of fun and even though it's 3 hours long it keeps things fresh enough by moving around the world that it doesn't get dull. And the end credits are an awesome little short film all their own, definitely worth sitting through. I also like that it incorporated national anthems into its musical score. Britain's "theme music" never sounded so good. I thought it was odd that of all the American music to pick they picked "Yankee Doodle Dandy" though...and they have the "Mexican Hat Dance" for Mexico too. For the Mexican actor playing a Frenchman. Let that sink in. Of course, Moses in the other movie was basically a Gentile playing a Jew playing an Egyptian. So whatever. Oh! I've just remembered that this movie also began with an intro from Edward R. Murrow and clips from Georges Méliés A Trip to the Moon which was one of the first real movies. And YES I have seen it in its entirety. I'm legit. While this was cool and would have been cool before the movie, I don't like that it's officially part of the film. Because I'm a purist. And a film douche at times. Shirley Maclaine was a hottie in this. There you go. I'm dialing it back.
Well that year had some variety anyway. I like to make fun of different things instead of just complaining about British people prattling on all the time. I was a little harsher on some of these than I perhaps meant to be, and I liked them a lot more than I let on. But I criticize because I love. Someday I'll make a movie about Moses where he goes back and kills all the people that helped him out for 40 years (look it up, it's in the Good Book), thus making a lot of money off of controversy. And if a movie is 3 hours and 40 minutes and at least 2 1/2 hours are good then I guess that's okay. I can only hope that 1955 is as interesting. But somehow I don't think so. All I know for now is that it will include tattooed melodrama, picnicking melodrama, and interracial melodrama. Scandalous!
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