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!
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