My Date with Oscar

#13 through #22: The 40s, 1940 through 1949

2010-01-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

From October through now, I watched the next ten Academy Award Best Picture films, but haven't yet blogged about any of them, so I guess it's time for a round-up on whatever thoughts I had (and can now still remember) on each of them.

#13: Rebecca (1940)

Winner Best Picture, 1940
Watched on: 10/3/2009

Erika and I sat down for a mini-marathon back in October, and Rebecca was first on the agenda. Shockingly, this film was not available on DVD, at least not via Netflix, and if I remember correctly, I couldn't find it on DVD elsewhere either, so I bought it on VHS. So that's completely baffling -- how is it that one of the great Alfred Hitchcock films isn't on DVD? Fairly ridiculous, if you ask me. I'd seen Rebecca before, and I'd also read the original book by Daphne du Maurier a couple times in the past, so I knew that I would enjoy watching it again. It's definitely one of my favorite old movies, and it's such a pleasure when a movie I already love won for Best Picture, because then I get to watch it again as a part of this project. For entirely pleasurable Gothic mystery and suspense, Rebecca can't be beat. I could watch this one again and again. It looks like you can catch it on TCM coming up in early February, and I'd highly recommend doing so, if you've never seen it before - or even if you have.

#14: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Winner Best Picture, 1941
Watched on: 10/3/2009

Hollywood seemed to really love a sentimental epic in these days, and How Green Was My Valley is certainly that. This is another film that I almost certainly would never have picked up on my own if I hadn't been doing this project, but in the end, I think I'm glad to have seen it. The tale of a family facing the gradual disintegration of life in a Welsh coal-mining town doesn't seem very new to us nowadays, but I suppose it was a fresher story when this came out, and at any rate, exploring the human ramifications of such a decline is a story that people want to hear again and again. I suppose you could easily modernize this tale and transport it from the Welsh hills to the crumbling American car industry on the current streets of Detroit, and it could likely play again with some success. How Green Was My Valley was a decent film overall, but its Best Picture win is historically significant primarily due to the fact that it beat out Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon. Certainly, in hindsight, its win probably wasn't entirely deserved, but I guess that's what makes this project so interesting from a sociological standpoint as well -- Academy Award wins are subject to their times, the political moods, reactions to past ceremonies, the sentiments and emotions of their days. On the heels of the Great Depression and the brink of another World War, when World War I was supposed to have been the War to End All Wars, it's is easy to see why a nostalgic film yearning for the earlier, better days of family, hearth, and home might have taken the prize.

#15: Mrs. Miniver (1942)

Winner Best Picture, 1942
Watched on: 10/3/2009

I did not find Mrs. Miniver particularly memorable. In fact, when I first thought of sitting down to write about it after a three month lag time, I had to look it up to jog my memory on the plot. I wouldn't say that Mrs. Miniver is a terrible movie by any means, it just didn't really stick with me all that much. It's the story of a British family in World War II, and it could probably best be described as propaganda. I think that during World War II, in particular, a number of the Best Picture wins had as much to do with what was going on in the world and the films' places in that context as they did with the quality of the films themselves. Honoring this film was definitely something akin to buying bonds, or starting a victory garden, or turning in one's jewelry to be melted down for the war effort. Again, it's not a bad film by any means, but it just didn't stick in my mind as a great film by any means either. I did like Greer Garson in it, but I think she's just generally a pretty good actress. I'd be interested to hear what Erika remembers or says about it -- it's the last of our mini-marathon films. Perhaps she'll read this and comment. You can catch it on TCM on February 26th and see what you think for yourself.

#16: Casablanca (1943)

Winner Best Picture, 1943
Watched on: 12/27/2009

Well, Mrs. Miniver may not have been all that memorable to me, but Casablanca is one of my most memorable films of all time for the same reason it winds up being on most people's most memorable movies of all time lists -- it is a truly great film. Yes, it too is a product of its times, it too is a movie about World War II and taking a stand for what is right, but it does it all without being propaganda. Incredible writing, fantastic acting, an interesting and unique plot, and great lines, ones you know even if you've never seen the film and you don't know how or why, they've just worked themselves into our collective consciousness -- "Here's looking at you, kid" and "Play it again, Sam" and "We'll always have Paris" and....well, do I need to go on? If you've never seen Casablanca, you need to stop what you're doing, procure a copy, and watch it immediately. And if you have (which I assume is most everyone?), see it again, such a pleasure to revisit. You can also catch it on TCM on February 14th (very fitting) and March 8th.

#17: Going My Way (1944)

Winner Best Picture, 1944
Watched on: 12/28/2009

It seems fairly well-accepted that Going My Way won the Best Picture award in 1944 because the war-weary nation needed its sentimental and uplifting tale, not to mention the beautiful croonings of Bing Crosby. And I'll tell you what, they were on to something there, at least. What a voice - I could listen to that man sing all day. It's a film people would use words like "heartwarming" to describe, for which other, more cynical people might substitute words like "sappy" -- and they'd both be right. I didn't care, I just went along with it, and when the predictable, heartwarming, sappy, sentimental ending came along, I cried during it just like I was supposed to. Well, why not? Everyone could use a movie like this now and again, and when it's reasonably well-done like Going My Way was, with Bing Crosby numbers on top of that, why not just sit back, take off the critical hat, and just feel good like you're supposed to? Because, heck, we'd all like to swing on a star and carry moonbeams home in a jar too, right?

#18: The Lost Weekend (1945)

Winner Best Picture, 1945
Watched on: 12/29/2009 and 12/31/2009 in two sessions

The contrast of watching Going My Way and The Lost Weekend back-to-back comes as a shock to the system strong enough not to rival but perhaps to prepare you for some of the ones the main character of The Lost Weekend experiences as he spends a long weekend in an out-of-control, alcoholic downward spiral. This was the first film to deal with the subject of alcohol addiction as an illness, and the effects of that illness on those who suffer it and the people in their lives. There's nothing entertaining or uplifting about this film, though the ending does bring hope, though it's a bit of one of those too-easy Hollywood endings, so you just hope it can be true - it would have been more uplifting had it been more realistic. It was certainly an important film, probably one that had to be made and seen in order to shine a light on a social problem that was very little understood at the time. It's worth seeing, knowing that it tackled a taboo subject, and that the alcohol industry actually tried to buy the negatives and prevent its release (though of course it subsequently applauded its success -- a bit of an early precursor to the "Please Drink Responsibly" disclaimers the alcohol industry uses nowadays?)

#19: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Winner Best Picture, 1946
Watched on: 12/31/2009

I liked The Best Years of Our Lives very much. A movie about the struggles and difficulties of three very different men who return to the same hometown at the same time after World War II, I found it to be very straightforward, realistic, and human. No hint of propaganda, no glossing over the difficulties, just a reasonably honest portrayal of the different problems each man (and the people in their lives) faced as they tried to adjust themselves to lives that could never be the same. Each of their stories, along with the ways in which they intertwined, were poignant without being sappy. It follows the bank executive who likes to drink a little too much after his return, and who can't be as ruthless in denying loans to the honest GIs who served with him as his employers would like him to be. The Air Force captain who was a soda jerk before the war finds himself unqualified for anything else afterwards, despite the large salary and respect he earned in wartime -- and stuck with a wife he knew for only 20 days, who'd never seen him out of uniform, and with whom it becomes increasingly obvious that he has nothing in common. And finally, you see the most painful adjustment of the young navy seaman, a former high school athlete, engaged to the faithful girl-next-door, who must find his way after losing both of his hands to an explosion, using two hooks instead. It seems to me that, nowadays, looking back, a lot of people want to believe that WWII veterans came home and just "got on with their lives" - and certainly, they did have to get on with their lives, but I liked the fact that this film portrayed much more nuance than that, and it wasn't so simple. Looks like you can catch The Best Years of Our Lives on TCM on February 2nd.

#20: Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

Winner Best Picture, 1947
Watched on: 1/1/2010

For me, Gentleman's Agreement had a few things going for it right off the bat. For one thing, it's main character was played by Gregory Peck who is (little-known fact) my Old Movie Boyfriend. Man, I love that guy. You can keep your Clark Gables and Cary Grants -- I'll take some Gregory Peck over them any day! Secondly, I love any movie (or play or book or song or piece of art) that fights injustice and intolerance. And so what an important movie! It's been noted that there were a lot of socially conscious themes in the post-war years, and of course this is no exception. But more than some of its predecessors, this was an incredibly brave film, one that a lot of people didn't want to see made. A lot of Americans wanted to believe that anti-Semitism was not, could not be, an American problem. After all, Americans fought Hitler, Americans shut down the extermination and concentration camps and freed the Jews in Europe. The film does hit you over the head with its message a bit, but I still love that it ripped the band-aid off and said, "examine yourselves." It is also very interesting within the context of the McCarthy Hearings on Communism in Hollywood in years to come -- the director, Elia Kazan, very famously and controversially named eight people in Hollywood as members of the Communist party; actress Anne Revere refused to testify and was blacklisted for nearly 20 years; and actor John Garfield died of a heart attack, allegedly from the stress of the proceedings, to name a few. It would seem that either being Jewish or being involved in projects that called attention to anti-Semitism made it much easier for one to be labeled as a Communist. My main beef with Gentleman's Agreement was that I didn't really buy the romance. It seemed absurd that two people would become so close (and in fact become engaged) within about sixty seconds of meeting each other, particularly since there was a child involved (the main charatcter was a widower). Of course, their relationship introduced interesting difficulties and twists as the reporter (who is posing as a Jewish man writing an article on anti-Semitism for a couple months) is faced with some of his fiancee's prejudices, or rather crimes of omission, of being a "nice" person who doesn't like anti-Semitism but quietly tolerates it (which is, of course, the gentleman's agreement). That was all fine, but the pat ending in which she sees the error of her ways and reforms lickety-split and they plan to live happily ever after just didn't ring true to me -- I would have much preferred him to realize that the straightforward female friend, with whom he has much in common, and who shares his staunch idealism and refusal to tolerate prejudice, was the gal for him. Ah well, perhaps that's for a different movie about sexism?

#21: Hamlet (1948)

Winner Best Picture, 1948
Watched on: 1/1/2010

I didn't really have great expectations for Hamlet (ha, see what I did there? A Dickens reference in a Shakespeare review -- I slay me!) I've tended to have mixed feelings about film adaptations of Shakespeare plays in general. I like them best on the stage, where I think they really belong, and for me, the film versions that are most successful are those that retain certain play-like qualities. (I loved the Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Dains Romeo and Juliet precisely because it managed to capture an intangible sense of stage, an other-worldly vibe, representing life in some alternate universe, not realistic life -- but I digress.) I kind of feel like this movie won the Academy Award because the Academy sort of scratched its head and said, "Well, it's Shakespeare, I guess we'd better give it the award?" It did maintain a simple set, and retain a lot of qualities of the stage, which I certainly appreciated, and it's never a bad thing to hear the great words of Shakespeare's Hamlet again (another case of so many lines that have wormed themselves into everyday lingo -- also, if you're familiar with Hamlet, feel free to enjoy my gratuitous "worm" reference here). I did think Olivier was a little old to realistically play Hamlet (but what's new, that happens all the time, sheesh, think of Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility!), and some things were a bit overdone (Ophelia's madness springs to mind). All-in-all, it's an okay adaptation of Hamlet, I just wasn't particularly thrilled. Though I did get a pretty good chuckle at the codpieces in the big sword-fighting scene with Laertes, but I suppose that's because I'm a little juvenile.

#22: All the King's Men (1949)

Winner Best Picture, 1949
Watched on: 1/2/2010

Here's another film I almost certainly wouldn't have selected if left to my own devices, though it is an interesting political drama about a Louisiana politician who starts out as an naive "hick" (as he refers to himself) seeking honesty and justice, and then rises to power and the governorship of Louisiana through increasingly unscrupulous means, with corruption, browbeating, cover-ups, and possibly even murder on his hands along the way. I guess that All the King's Men is based loosely on the real-life story of Louisiana governor and then Senator Huey Pierce Long. It's a little weird, I guess, but even though I watched All the King's Men only today, I don't really have all that much I can think of to say about it. I guess you could watch it on February 19th or March 14th on TCM and form your own opinions. The only thing I take away from a film like this is my own possibly naive hope that there isn't this much corruption and dishonesty in all of politics. Well, that, and I'm interested in watching the 2006 Sean Penn film, I think it would be interesting to contrast the two.

WHEW. Well, that's it! A decade of Best Picture films! Perhaps next time I shouldn't wait so long to write about them all, as this has taken me a few hours to put together. But at least I've picked up some steam in my viewing -- perhaps it won't take me the rest of my life to get through all these films!

#12: Gone With The Wind (1939)

2009-06-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Winner Best Picture at the 1939 Academy Awards

After a very long hiatus, I'm finally returning to watching Academy Award Best Picture winners. Gone With The Wind has been on deck for a very long time, partly because it has been difficult to find the time to fit a four-hour film into my schedule. (Here is my husband's complete review of the film after we watched it last night: "That was a long-ass movie. What a comedy of errors!")

Gosh, what can I say about Gone With The Wind that hasn't already been said before? It's such an enduringly popular film, and yet, for me, it's also such a problematic film. Here's a film that in some ways really glorifies the Old South and slavery, right from the very beginning, referring to it as a land of knights and their ladies fair, and yet at the same time, even within the film, it's not so simple, and even more confusingly, the whole movie really struck a blow for equal rights when Hattie McDaniel became not only the first African American to receive an Academy Award, with her win for Best Supporting Actress, but also became the first African American to EVER TO ATTEND THE AWARD CEREMONY AS A GUEST, for crying out loud. So I would definitely class it as problematic.

And maybe problematic is the point. Life is, after all, often problematic and conflicting, just like Scarlet O'Hara - a spoiled, petulant brat who also happens to be unbelievably stronger and more independent than she realizes. I think I would have to say that my favorite element of the movie is the relationship between Scarlet and Melanie - I love the way that Scarlet views Melanie as a rival and an obstacle to her affections for the tedious, whiny, spineless Ashley (seriously, what does she see in that guy? What do either of them see?), but in the end, the person whom she really loves and who loves her is Melanie. Melanie has her back, time and again, whether she likes it or not. There's a definite undercurrent of female solidarity that is very nice, and which runs through many of the female relationships in the movie.

Anyway, as I said, there's little for me to say about this movie that hasn't already been said, I suppose. I'd seen it before, and I was glad to see it again, but there are definitely too many things wrong with it for me to say it's a favorite.

Okay, I'm going to wrap it up, since I watched the movie on June 5th, and it has taken me to today (July 16th!) to finish up the post about it. Time to go on to the next film.

#7 through #11: Round-Up of 1934 through 1938

2009-03-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

I'm so entirely behind on blogging the Best Picture films that I've watched that I think I'll just do a little omnibus entry for all of the ones I've watched so that I can catch up. I've stopped watching films, because I didn't want to get any further behind on the blogging, and it seems silly to let a thing like blogging interfere with what I want to do in my life. So here goes:

#7: It Happened One Night (1934):

Winner, Best Picture, 1934
Watched on: 11/7/2008

This was the first year that the Academy Awards switched to a calendar-year time period, and coincidentally, this was the first of the Academy Award winning Best Picture films that I'd actually seen before. It Happened One Night is simply put a delightful, lovely film -- I thought that the first time I saw it, and I think that still. And I'm not alone in that opinion -- as Filmsite points out, it was the first film to win all of the top five awards, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adaptation, a feat not repeated until 1975 with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I think they also very rightly describe it as one of the best romantic comedies ever. Since I'm writing about a lot of films here, I'm going to keep it short and sweet and just give my general impressions. I love It Happened One Night. If you haven't seen it, you should. I could watch it over and over again. Because of its enduring popularity, it's really easy to catch it on TV as well -- I see from that last link that it's scheduled to play on TCM at least three times in the near future.

#8: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935):

Winner, Best Picture, 1935
Watched on: 11/7/2008

As much as I loved It Happened One Night and Clark Gable in it, he couldn't save Mutiny on the Bounty for me. My friend Erika and I did a little movie marathon back in November over the course of two days, in which we watched It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Great Ziegfeld, in that order. When Mutiny on the Bounty had ended, we both heaved a sigh of relief, and I turned to her and said, "Whew. We did it." Particularly on the heels of the light, screwball romantic comedy, MotB seemed particularly long, tedious, and painful. It may be, in the words of Filmsite, one of the best nautical adventure films of all time, but I guess I can just say then that nautical adventure films are just not my thing. Since I didn't much like it, I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing much more about it. But it is worth going to those links above to read some more about. It was an expensive film to make, and was interstingly shot on location in the South Seas for authenticity sake, which I thought was an unusual and nice choice for a film of its time.

#9: The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

Winner, Best Picture, 1936
Watched on: 11/8/2008

What a stunningly different film this was from Mutiny on the Bounty, and how odd to watch them one after another. The Great Ziegfeld can very rightly be described as lavish. It's one of the first words that springs to mind when watching the elaborate stage scenes, and it seems to be one of the most common words found anywhere when describing it. It was even lavish in length -- three hours. There is criticism to be found online about this film winning -- Filmsite indicates that there were at least three far superior films that should have beat out The Great Ziegfeld. But no matter to me, anyway -- it was a heckuva lot of fun checking out the crazy costumes and massive headdresses and the singing and performing, and watching the biopic of Ziegfeld's life along with it. It may not have been the best film, but it's pretty darn entertaining.

#10: The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

Winner, Best Picture, 1937
Watched on: 1/10/2009

Well, now here's a film that I probably never would have watched had I not been watching all of these Best Picture films, but which I thoroughly enjoyed all the same. That really is one of the nice side-effects of this project. I end up watching things that I wouldn't choose for myself and thus broadening my horizons a little bit. The Life of Emile Zola is a film about justice, and one man's dedication to it. Yet another biopic (these were so popular in the 30s, who knew?), if follows the life and writing career of Emile Zola, and focuses on the historically important Dreyfus Affair, in which he fought to free the wrongfully imprisoned Captain Dreyfus, a victim of anti-Semitic framing within the French army in the 1800s. I think this film doesn't seem to be very popular any more -- it's not scheduled to be played on TCM anytime soon, for example -- but it was worth seeing. I found it very engaging, and I always do enjoy a film in which justice prevails. Who wouldn't, especially in a world where it doesn't always?

#11: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Winner, Best Picture, 1938
Watched on: 1/18/2009

I was quite certain that I had seen You Can't Take it With You before -- and I was also quite wrong. Still, even though it wasn't the film that I thought it was (wonder what that was? who knows...) You Can't Take It With You was a relatively amusing film -- and of course, it's actually somewhat unusual for a comedy to have won Best Picture, as that remains the exception rather than the rule in Oscar history overall. It's the story of a prominent banker's son who falls for his spunky secretary, and the hilarity that ensues when he meets her highly eccentric family, and even worse, his snobbish parents meet her highly eccentric family. Jimmy Stewart gave a particularly enjoyable and rather signature performance as the banker's son. Even if the whole thing gets predictably wrapped up in a shiny bow at the end, I think we can all use a feel-good movie in which everyone learns the lessons they should in the end, and I especially enjoyed the fact that this movie really embraces people's wild diversity.

And with that -- I am caught up. Now I can move on to 1939 - Gone With the Wind -- which happens to be the second of the Best Picture films that I had seen previous to starting this Oscarfest.

Sundance, Best of Fest: Sin Nombre

2009-03-01T07:45:00.000-08:00

To my extreme irritation, I had written a substantial portion of a blog entry on my cell phone, and it is now mysteriously missing. Nothing is left but the header. Ah well. Rest assured, I said any number of deep, profoud things. Okay, maybe not.

At any rate, it's about a month after the fact, so it's time I finish blogging about the last Sundance film that we saw this year, Sin Nombre, which translates roughly to something like Unnamed, or Without Name. This was such an incredible film, one whose images have really stuck with me, even a month later. If you go read the description, it's described as being "in the tradition of American film noir." I had thought that description inaccurate, but reading a little bit about Film Noir here and then here, I suppose that strictly speaking, the film does meet some of the definitions given on those sites of film noir -- the line between good and evil blurred, moral ambiguity, despair prevailing, not necessarily a congenial ending. Still this felt less like film noir to me and more like a tragedy along Shakespearean or even classical lines, though perhaps it also contains too much hope simultaneously to really fit that definition.

At any rate, whatever dramatic genre it falls into, Sin Nombre is a simultaneously dark but at times oddly beautiful film, one that definitely defied my expectations. I found it to be a fascinating look into the incredible dangers people are willing to face for a better life, and I had no idea that people actually rode on the tops of trains to try to get from Central America and Mexico to America. I also found it to be a simultaneously horrific and yet compelling look into gang life in Mexico. I loved that nothing was simple -- in a surreal world in which evil seems commonplace and accepted, little bits of humanity crept through all the same. I thought the gang leader was most brilliantly written and acted -- as you watch a 12-year-old boy who is trying to become an accepted member of the gang, you can envision his future and his likely ending if he continues along his current path as you also look at the leader, his face fully tattooed, barely recognizable as a normal human being, seemingly morally as far gone as a person can be, showing no mercy and no remorse. And yet they don't allow anything to be as simple as that -- the audience watches in horror as he orders a defenseless, begging man be killed, chopped up, and fed to his dogs, but the whole scene made brilliant by the fact that while he's carrying out these gang leader duties, he's also carrying around a tiny baby in a cute little suit of pajamas. Thus, the mundane, everyday things that everyone does are intermixed with horrific acts that hopefully not many can imagine. He had another similar moment, in which he brutally attacks and tries to rape a woman, and as she falls and is killed when her head hits some stones, the briefest moment of normal human fear and remorse flickers through his eyes, before they shut down again.

And so this is the atmosphere and setting in which the action unfolds, one in which nothing is simple, as a girl named Sayra rides on a train top with a father she barely knows because he's spent most of her life living in New Jersey. She encounters a gang member named Casper, who becomes her unlikely travel companion after he somewhat unintentionally (and yet perhaps entirely intentionally) severs his ties with his gang and as a result, must try to escape their very long reach, lest he too become dinner for the dogs. And so, again in a way that is not simple, a story of hope and a dangerous bid for freedom becomes intermixed with a literal attempt at escape -- a perilous chase superimposed upon an already difficult odyssey.

Though this blog is anything but spoiler-free, I'm not going to give away the ending. But I found this film very surprising - I went into it expecting it to be heavy and depressing. It was very heavy indeed, but in a way that was well worth watching and not at all what I expected. I would totally recommend it.

There are some trailers online as well:

One here and another one here. I don't know if it's going to get a wide release, but it looks like it was picked up by Focus Films, and you can check out their site here.

Sundance, Best of Fest: An Education

2009-02-11T05:48:00.000-08:00

Sundance always does this wonderful thing - every year after the festival is over and the awards have been given, they play a selection of the year's award-winning films at their various venues on the same night, and the tickets are absolutely free. The only catch is that you must go pick up your free tickets in advance of the festival at the designated time. (Though this year in Ogden that didn't seem much to matter, as the crowds were not huge, and they were giving out free tickets at the door as well.)

This year Charlie and I were both free when they were handing out the tickets, so we stopped at the box office and got our max 2 each per show, so we were able to take two friends with us to each showing.

Erika and Krista joined us for the early showing, and we were expecting to see an Irish film called Five Minutes of Heaven, starring Liam Neeson. So we were surprised indeed when they announced that the film we were about to see was An Education. No idea why they made the switch, but I was actually really happy about it. I'd really wanted to see An Education when it played in Ogden in the first place, but it was one of the nights that I hadn't been able to go. Plus, the Irish film seemed really sad and heavy from the description, so honestly, a somewhat less serious film was a relief.

We all totally loved An Education. It just really had everything going for it. Funny at times yet serious, dramatic without getting too carried away, beautifully filmed, impressively acted, excellent writing, an interesting plot. Carey Mulligan easily takes my Best of Fest prize, having starred in two of my favorite films that I saw, An Education and The Greatest.

Rather than regurgitating my own movie synopsis, especially after this long delay in blogging since I actually saw the film, I'll let you read about it through the link above. But this was a fantastic film, and if you get the chance, you should absolutely see it. I will probably buy this one on DVD if I get a chance, because I really loved it, and I'd really like to see it again.

Sundance: Pomegranates and Myrrh

2009-01-29T06:14:00.000-08:00

I've been taking my time starting this review. Charlie and I saw the movie Pomegranates and Myrrh at Sundance last Thursday night.

Here's the thing. I like to consider myself a thoughtful, intellectual, liberal, educated sort of person who does stuff like listen to NPR for fun. And because of that, I feel like I should appreciate a film that puts a human story into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right? So, I've been reluctant to say this, but the truth is, I found Pomegranates and Myrrh...well, a little boring. There. The truth is out.

I wanted to like this movie more than I did. It's about a woman who is a dancer with a troupe that specializes in traditional Palestinian dance. She gets married, and then her new husband is wrongfully imprisoned by Israeli soldiers and their land is threatened by "settlers" who pitch a tent and camp out with guns. The story follows how she and her family deal with this, and also how she continues to have dance in her life and refuses to allow herself to be defined by only her husband's imprisonment. It sounds pretty good, right? But in practice, I found my mind wandered, it just wasn't that engaging to me. And I left wondering if I just didn't have enough cultural knowledge to truly understand or appreciate it. Maybe that's true. Or maybe it just wasn't a very engaging movie.

I even felt guilty for not appreciating the dancing more. I often enjoy folk dancing. But the dancing in this movie, I must admit, didn't seem that great to me, and talk about feeling culturally insensitive! But, hey, since this is already a blog confessional, I'll admit that too. I can certainly appreciate the importance of maintaining one's cultural traditions, and that is even more important if you're in a culture under pressure like the one in this film. I get it. I support it...again, in theory. And so I guess overall, I found the movie disappointing, because I wanted it to be so much better than it was, and so I felt a bit let down.

Sundance: Endgame

2009-01-29T06:09:00.000-08:00

Charlie and I saw Endgame last Wednesday night(the 21st), and I wasn't sure how I was going to like it. Sometimes films with heavy, serious topics bring me down, depending on the handling. But I was more than pleased to discover that I enjoyed this film a lot. It plays like a thriller, and keeps you on the edge of your seat as everything unfolds, which the director explained was his intent. He was there beforehand and then for the Q&A afterward, and he made the point that he wanted the audience to feel suspense and tension watching a story where they already knew the outcome, and I think he totally succeeded in that. Because as I was watching it, I was swept up in the mood of fear and unease of the time, wondering how it would all turn out okay, even though I KNEW that apartheid was going to end, Nelson Mandela would be released from jail, and the terrorism and violence in South Africa would subside (well, it's all relative, eh? South Africa continues to have a very high violent crime rate, including what the State Department's web page reports as the highest reported rape rate in the world.)

At any rate, the behind-the-scenes events that unfolded in this film, including secret talks held at a posh English manor house, were so interesting. I really had no idea that such things went on - and I knew about apartheid, I was paying attention, I cared that it ended. I had no idea that a company (Consolidated Gold) was so instrumental in bringing an end to apartheid, and that they started out doing so to protect their financial interests. The whole thing was really fascinating, and very well done. If, like me, you're thinking you might not want to deal with a heavy political film, I encourage you to do so. This one is totally worth it.

Sundance: Lulu und Jimi

2009-01-22T20:01:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday night I headed out on my own to see the German film Lulu und Jimi, but I met up with my knitter friend Amy and a friend of hers, so I joined them. That is one of the nice things about Ogden Sundance - and Ogden itself. It's a small enough community, you're always seeing friends and familiar faces.

Lulu und Jimi is a brightly colored, sometimes surreal, sometimes kitchy, sometimes slightly grotesque (in the literary sense of the word) love story set in 1950's Germany, a blending of races, cultures, and post-war angst and desire for plenty. It was also clearly a lyrical and strange German ode to David Lynch. (This is a sentence I never would have imagined myself writing.) There are moments that seem like loving tribute to Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks, and a little internet research as well as the thanks to "David L." In the opening credits confirm that homage was the intent. Lord knows I loves me some David Lynch, and I really enjoyed this film as well. It is distinctive, and very much unlike other German films (though I usually enjoy German cinema, and also enjoy the opportunity to brush up on my German skills a bit).

Another balloted contender for the Best Foreign Drama category, I gave this one 3 out of 4 stars, though I wish I could give it something more like 3.5. If I had to rank it against the other two contenders I've seen, I'd put it in first place. Hell, the pink poodle alone probably would have done that. The costumes and sets are genius. This film is definitely worth seeing.

Sundance: The Greatest

2009-01-22T19:57:00.000-08:00

Monday night my usual Sundance date had to work the night shift, and so I went to see The Greatest with my good friend, Erika.

I loved this film. I will go so far as to say I think it is now one of my favorite movies I've ever seen. Seriously. It is that good. I think I'd rank it up there with Secrets and Lies for me, with a similar universal and sometimes painful human insight and range of emotion, not to mention fantastic execution.

The writing is phenomenal. The actors are all pitch-perfect. The cinematography, the pacing, the direction, everything just works. And the story...the story is so good, so real. I found it almost haunting. I literally woke up thinking about it in detail the next morning, and it made me cry all over again. But the emotion isn't maudlin - it feels very authentic, and I think that's why it stuck with me so much.

The story is about the death of an eighten-year-old boy, and the ways in which his family and the girl who was with him when he died deal with the aftermath of that death. In a balanced way, it follows each of them in their grief, and the ways they deal with that grief, with one another, and with the other problems and tensions that existed in their lives which are overshadowed but not erased, and which must be dealt with too.

This is the first film for writer/director Shana Feste, and that's amazing to me - she seems so talented, to have sprung into film so fully formed like this. She was there with her producer, Lynette Howell, for Q&A afterward, and I was immediately struck by their relative youth when they walked on stage - which was inspiring and cool. It was a balloted film, part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition, and the first balloted film this festival that I've given 4 out of 4 stars, which I did without hesitation. I just really loved this film - I hope they sell it and make a lot of money and it really launches their filmmaking careers so they can make more great films like this. And when it comes to a theater near you, you should see it.

Sundance: Rudo y Cursi

2009-01-20T09:24:00.000-08:00

Sunday afternoon Charlie and I headed to Sundance again, this time to see a Mexican film, Rudo y Cursi. It's a comedy about a couple of goofy brothers who work on a banana ranch in Mexico and get discovered by a soccer talent scout.

This was a fun movie, and definitely worth a watch. We chose it because we like Sundance, and also because we like soccer, though there was surprisingly little actual soccer action in it. The crowd was more mixed than the usual Sundance crowds - it seemed to also attract some people for the soccer, and some for the Spanish language. (I kept thinking that they might be disappointed at times, because I didn't think they had the sound up loud enough, and then the audience that was reading subtitles probably kept laughing over the spoken parts.)

The description says something about how you can take the brothers off the banana ranch, but you may not be able to take thew banana ranch out of the brothers. And that's actually pretty apt. It's a funny story, and one that is interestingly told, but you really do end up caring for the characters and their fates. I believe some of the actors are fairly well-known in Mexico, and I can see this film being a pretty big commercial success in Mexico at least, a place where football is king, footballers are like gods, and there are no doubt thousands of small-town football players with their own big-time dreams.

As an entertaining side-note, this post was written almost entirely while stopped at red lights. How is that for multi-tasking?

As I'm finally finishing this up and adding a photo so that I can post, it's Tuesday now, and I have two more films to blog about already -- Monday night I saw The Greatest, and tonight I saw Lulu und Jimi. So more posts to come soon.

Sundance: Before Tomorrow and Louise-Michel

2009-01-18T08:46:00.000-08:00

Last night we saw two more Sundance films. Just a quick post on both of them.

The first was Before Tomorrow.

Before Tomorrow is a drama that felt at times almost documentary-like. It was a slow-paced film filled with vast silences. One of the co-directors was there, a French-Canadian woman named Marie-Hélène Cousineau, and she spoke briefly of the film before it began and answered some questions afterwards. The basic plot follows an Inuit woman and her grandson in a tribe in northern Canada before the tribe came into contact with white people, though they meet with friends or relatives who talk about seeing a great ship appear and interacting with strange people. The main characters are a grandmother and grandson, played by an actual grandmother and grandson, who go to a close-by island for part of the summer with another elderly woman to dry fish for the tribe for the winter. The other elderly woman dies, and when the tribe fails to return for the grandmother and grandson, they set out on their own in a boat and discover that tragedy has struck (it appears in the form of smallpox or some other disease, likely brought by the strange ship), and all of their relatives have died. What follows in the film is the story of the strength of the grandmother, as she and her grandson survive on their own in isolation. The story itself seems interesting, the attention to detail in presenting the Inuit culture was interesting, and much of the filming was beautiful and barren. Yet it was a difficult film to watch -- it had such great stretches of silence, and at many times it felt as if your endurance and patience were being tested, just as the grandmother's and grandson's must have been. The one line that stuck with me was when the grandmother exclaimed, "When will this nightmare end?", and I must admit, watching the film felt a little bit like that. When will it end? How could it end well? How can I endure watching it if it just gets worse and worse? It is entirely in an Inuit language with subtitles, and it seems to be worth having seen, but at the same time, I don't know if I could recommend it -- hard to explain that. It wasn't exactly painful, but it also wasn't enjoyable. Really, for me, the most interesting parts were listening to Marie-Hélène Cousineau discuss it, how they filmed the appropriate scenes in the appropriate seasons, how they filmed with only traditional oil lamp light in the night scenes using HD, how in winter it was -40 C, etc. Anyway, not sure what else to comment on for the film. It was a balloted film, and I voted 2 out of 4 stars ("good") for it, because although I am glad that I saw it, and can see why it is important in terms of preserving Inuit language and traditions and culture, I can't say that I particularly enjoyed seeing it, it was a test of movie-going endurance, even though I suppose it helped me understand the world a little better.

The second film we saw was Louise-Michel, a French film that was also balloted.

This film was....how do I put this? Well, it was so French. It is really difficult to imagine a film that is any more opposite from Before Tomorrow than this one, and so the contrast in seeing them both in one evening was marked. The Sundance site describes the film as a quixotic revenge comedy, the story of displaced factory workers who decide to put a hit out on the factory boss after their factory is shut down without notice. The idea is suggested by the odd character of Louise, and Louise finds another odd character Michel to enact the plan. The film follows what ensues, and I'd just suggest clicking on my link above and reading the description rather than me trying to re-create it less succinctly. This was definitely a black comedy, at times veering into the grotesque, at times absurd, and at times downright shocking -- I am sure I exclaimed, "Oh my God!" more than one time. The audience reaction to this film was amazing to compare to that of Before Tomorrow -- in Before Tomorrow, the audience's silence was palpable, it was uncanny, it was more silent than you can imagine several hundred people being -- the normal rustling and coughing and reactions were almost not present. It was as if the silence of the film's landscape and characters blanketed the audience as well, and wrapped them up in it. The reactions to Louise-Michel were loud, guffaws, exclamations, disbelieving laughter, and more. It too was a balloted film, and in the end, I gave it 3 out of 4 stars ("better") -- it was a totally strange, surreal, disturbed slice of life, but it made me laugh as well. Don't think it should win the audience choice prize either, but in a way completely unlike Before Tomorrow, it too was worth seeing.

ETA: Louise-Michel won "A World Cinema Special Jury Prize for Originality." Well, it certainly was original!

Sundance: Mary and Max

2009-01-17T06:53:00.000-08:00

I am going to interrupt my irregular, seldom-scheduled blogging about Academy Award winning films to blog about some other films that I'm watching, because I feel like it. Yes, I'm allowed to undermine the theme of my own blog, right?

It's that time of year again -- Sundance kicked off Thursday night, and though I have never actually attended any Sundance films in Park City (which is weird, but true -- I've just always wanted to avoid the zoo), I have the luxury of living in Ogden on my side, which is home to one of the most beautiful movie theaters there is (Peery's Egyptian Theater). For the last 12 years, the Egyptian has been used as a Sundance venue as well. The wonderful things about this include the fact that it's a pretty big theater compared to many used for Sundance (seats around 800), they give locals first dibs on Sundance tickets anyway, and even after that, the Ogden showings take a little while to fill up -- if they do fill up. And so it's easy to get tons of tickets to see amazing films every year right here in my little town, sometimes even premieres, or at least films where they bring in the writers or directors or producers or even some of the stars or documentary subjects to talk about the films before they start, or have Q&A sessions afterward. This year I have tickets to ten films between January 16th and 27th -- so I figured I'd try to blog about them here.

(I haven't blogged Best Picture films for a long time, although I watched It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Great Ziegfeld at the beginning of November, and then I watched The Life of Emile Zola last week. I'm sure I'll catch up one of these days...)

So last night Charlie and I went to see our first Sundance film this year, an incredible film called Mary and Max. It was actually the film chosen to kick off the entire festival in Park City the night before, and I loved it. It's a stop animation or claymation film made by independent Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot (he as the writer/director and his producer Melanie Coombs were there to talk about it, and they were fantastic -- they said all filmmakers in Australia are independent, and the filmmaking community there is relatively small and doesn't have a lot of funding.)

I would have to say first of all that, though I only started attending Sundance within the last couple years, Mary and Max is my absolute favorite Sundance film I've seen so far. If you're reading this review, you should definitely click on that last link and visit their film website to get a feel for what the film is like. And if you get the chance to go see it in the theater, you should go. If you don't get that chance, then you should definitely rent it on DVD. The film was engrossing from the very opening shots. It's an entirely "in camera" animation -- no computer tricks, just five years of work, including over one year of filming at a rate of 4 seconds per animator per day, everything created with painstaking and loving attention to quirky detail, from the individual drops of water created using what amounted to cases of water-based sexual lubricant (!) to the plasticine model working typewriter. The musical score and the tonal color palettes give the movie a very unique mood and feel -- it isn't a happy, animated kids' fluff project, it's a poignant film for adults that makes you laugh, makes you uncomfortable at times, makes you cry, and just generally explores human imperfection, friendship, and acceptance. The basic premise starts off with a lonely, ostracized eight-year-old girl, Mary Dinkle, who lives in Australia, and who one day rips a corner out of a New York City phonebook and starts up a pen friendship by writing a letter to a complete stranger. The stranger turns out to be Max Horovitz, a lonely, middle-aged Jewish man living in New York, who is equally friendless, obese, and struggling to live in a world he does not understand. The film follows the two through 20 years, as they exchange letters and their lives deeply affect one another despite their great distance and seeming disparity. Truly, the word poignant gets thrown around a lot in a rather meaningless way, but this film really earns it. It's the very best kind of story -- both touching and ridiculous, just like life itself, and when the credits roll, you feel like you actually understand life just a little bit more. I will add that it's so incredibly well done in every element that when the credits rolled, that was the first time I noticed or remembered throughout the entire course of the film that it was actually voiced by famous people with recognizable voices -- Toni Collette, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Barry Humphries (i.e. Dame Edna!), to name a few. For the entire film, I was completely absorbed into the world that Elliot created -- usually in animated films, I am always very much aware of the actor behind the voice if it's someone well known -- and there are numerous examples, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, etc.

Mary and Max is a film that deserves to be described as truly touching, and I only wish the word weren't so painfully overused and could really convey what I mean. I definitely want to see it again, and will likely buy it when it is released on DVD. I hope it gets picked up for a US release and that people will give it the chance it deserves, to quote the film, "warts and all."

#6: Cavalcade (1932/33)

2008-09-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

Winner Best Picture at the 1932/33 Academy Awards

This was the last time that the Academy Awards spanned from one year to the next like this. The ceremony covered an extra-long period of time so that in the next year, the ceremony would be calendar year based and cover 1934 only.

I was on a roll yesterday, and so I ended up watching Cavalcade in addition to Grand Hotel. This was the first Best Picture film that was both not available on DVD and that I couldn't manage to catch on television, so I ended up purchasing a used VHS tape from an Amazon seller (in perfect condition). As I've mentioned before, there are still a handful of these films that are not yet available on DVD, including Wings and Sunrise, though good news, Netflix now indicates that Sunrise will be available on DVD in December 2008.

At any rate, this doesn't seem to be a very popular film now, and many online reviewers seem to feel that it has not stood the test of time, particularly since it didn't have any big-name actors. There are a number of folks to be found on the internet who are very critical of the film, calling it boring, complaining about the acting, etc. I think that is unfair to a large degree. I actually found the film quite interesting, and I liked getting a historical glimpse into a time and place that I am not quite as familiar with as I thought I was, judging from the contents of this film.

Part of the criticism of the film likely stems from the fact that it was adapted from a stage play, and it retained some elements of the stage. Not the least of those was a number of the actual cast members. But honestly, I don't mind a movie that feels like a play, in fact, there are some notable examples that I really love. I wouldn't go so far as to say I loved this movie, but I didn't find it overly stagey, at least not enough to merit the criticism. The acting, which was criticized in places for being overblown and better suited for the stage, also didn't bother me -- it seemed good enough for its day, and I didn't notice that it was glaringly overblown, so I can't complain about that. Sure, as I've said before, it's not modern, natural acting, but it wasn't meant to be -- it was more along the lines of what was valued at the time.

The film covers a sweeping timeframe, from New Year's Eve in 1899 through New Year's Eve in 1932, following two families, in a sort of an Ur-Upstairs-Downstairs, seemingly a precursor to the genre that we've seen numerous times since (my favorite example and one of my all-time favorite movies being Gosford Park). At any rate, though it covers such a long period of time in the lives of these two British families, very much like Cimarron did, I thought that the pacing was much better, the different major times and milestones were hit, dealt with evenly, and flowed into the subsequent scenes much better by far.

As the time-period and locale hints, this is yet another film that dealt with World War I, though it was merely one of many elements. Still, some critics have pointed at that it was also an anti-war film, though in a subtler way than All Quiet on the Western Front. What I thought it conveyed even better than that, though, was a portrayal of a rapidly, almost drastically changing world, and the way that affected the lives of the people in it. Things must have seemed like they were moving fast and faster to people living in such a time, in ways that were good and bad, and its no surprise at all that people wanted to capture that feeling first on the stage and then on film. One of the elements of the film that I thought actually best conveyed this rapidly changing, bustling feeling was the seemingly endless noise and terrible crush of people in many of the scenes in the film -- it gave it an almost overwhelming feeling at times, one which I thought seemed appropriate for the ways the world was changing then.

It seems fitting that this film that culminated with the Jazz Age and then the early years of the Great Depression should win the Best Picture Award for 1932/33, the last awards ceremony to take place in pre-Hays Code Hollywood. It was sort of like shaking up a cocktail of change and disillusionment, and then watching the reactionaries circle in for the kill. You know, I just did a little Wikipedia research, and I find it very interesting that the Hays Code took effect the very year after Prohibition was repealed. I wonder what that means? It seems significant to me, somehow. At any rate, I'm getting off on a tangent. But my point was, it was interesting to see some of the latter scenes in this film, the dancing and drinking and Jazz and empty churches, and reflect that in the very next year, strict morality codes were imposed on film. If you haven't read about the Hollywood censorship guidelines, I recommend doing so -- it's very interesting, and it also explains why you can watch films from the 20s and be shocked by the lack of prudishness -- so funny the way these things go in cycles, time and time again. After all, the Victorians were shocked by the Edwardians. Ahem, but again, I think I'm getting tangential. At any rate, if you have the time, I highly recommend reading through that Wikipedia link about pre-Code films. The Hays Code really shaped the future of film from the time it was put into place in 1934, in some ways that actually weren't bad (plots about "headstrong, able, employed women," for example). But at any rate, after this film, I'm about to embark on a LONG series of films that did have to adhere to The Code and live up to the values of the Legion of Decency (no joke!) and the Roman Catholic church until (I am not kidding here) 1967. I am seriously starting to love this Oscar project. It's giving me a much broader historical perspective and understanding, as seen through film and my related research, than I ever would have expected. Bring it on!

#5: Grand Hotel (1931/32)

2008-09-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

Winner, Best Picture, 1931/1932 Academy Awards Ceremony

Now we're talking! Great actors and actresses, intertwining plot lines, love, intrigues, stereotypes that aren't quite stereotypes, a sumptuous Art Deco set...now this is my kind of movie.

I just finished watching it, and honestly, I'm not sure that there's much to actually say about this film. It's more something to simply be watched and enjoyed. And I did -- I enjoyed it very much. Even with Greta Garbo's sort of weird acting, which might have been good, though it was hard to tell, what with all that throwing her head back all the time. If you ask me, Joan Crawford seriously steals the show. But perhaps I'm in a minority, as I found numerous reviewers online who thought Garbo was magnificent. There's certainly something about her, because I can't quite say I found her terrible, but she was unusual anyway.

At any rate, rather than force some sort of review that I'm just not feeling is forthcoming, I'll just suggest that if you're interested, you can rent it from Netflix, and read about it on IMDB, TCM, The Greatest Films, or Wikipedia. Beware, though -- as with all of the reviews and links I post for movies, you're bound to find spoilers there if you're intent on being spoiler-free. Oh, and I noticed on that TCM link that they will also be playing it in both November and December. (TCM has a great feature where you can sign up for them to e-mail you a reminder of when a particular film is going to be on.)

Rent this movie, watch it, enjoy it. It's not going to change your life, and probably won't become your favorite movie ever, but it's just plain entertaining.

#4: Cimarron (1930/31)

2008-09-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

Winner "Best Picture" in the 1930/31 Academy Award Ceremony

Technically the first Best Picture, since this was the year that the category changed from Best Production to Best Picture

Admittedly, I think I was sort of putting off watching this movie. I mentioned before that I'm not much of a fan of war movies. Well, on that note, I'm probably even less of a fan of Westerns, particularly of the traditional variety. I watched this about a week ago in two sittings. I made most of my notes for this blog entry then, but I'm just now getting a chance to sit down and finish it now.

There's a lot in this movie that's challenging, complicated, complex. I feel like the filmmaking and the acting probably aren't doing justice to Edna Ferber's text, but of course I can't say that for sure unless I read it. It was a difficult film for me to make it through, and I had to watch it in sessions, because I honestly just wasn't all that into it. I can see why people call it one of the weakest Best Picture films in the history of the Academy Awards. But there were occasional moments that were really good, like the moment of true pathos that takes place in the Cravat family following a big gunfight in the street. It achieves a glimmer of a great film at least when the family stops suddenly in mid-conversation, and you see Sabra Cravat's face as she looks through a doorway, discovering the thing that the viewer has already known -- the family's loyal servant, the young black boy Isaiah, the stowaway on their adventure west to Oklahoma, has been shot in the street while looking for the family's five-year-old son. You knew they would discover it, but you didn't know for sure they would be so struck by it, and you certainly didn't expect what happened next, for him to be carried in by the tiny, much-harrassed Sol, the only Jew in town, the marginalized Other carrying in yet another marginalized Other, a tender unexpected Pieta, this sad burden passed from Sol to Yancey, who throughout the film is slowly becoming an ever-increasing voice of justice for any outcast at the time, whether black, Jew, Native American, or madam.

The character may have been intended to be a voice of justice, but as a leading man, Richard Dix just wasn't at all compelling -- that was definitely a major drawback for me in this film. I found him hard to sympathize with, when theoretically, he should have been my favorite characters. Instead, he seemed artificial, and I think he was aptly destined for the B-movie western future in which he eventually found himself. I mean, look, I realize that this was pre-Brando, pre-method acting times. (Actually, Wikipedia contradicts me -- Method Acting was around. But it wasn't really popularized until later by people like Brando, so I stand y my statement.) People did not necessarily act in a way that was natural, and that also wasn't expected. But this guy was really pretty terrible even by contemporary standards, if you ask me. And it's a shame, really, because his is such an interesting character, so complex and contradictory and nuanced -- it really deserved a masterful actor to portray it in a way that would do any justice to the idea of a man who would in one breath make derogatory comments against the government stealing the Indians' land, and in the very next moment be lining up to take his share of that land and adventure. His love scenes and declarations and sweeping his wife into his arms were at times especially unconvincing, and sometimes even kind of creepy.

Speaking of the strange relationship between the two main characters, parts of the plot really didn't make sense to me. Here's a man who abandons his family for five years without a word, off in search of adventure, and yet he comes riding up home one fine day, and is wife quickly falls into his arms, his kids are just cheery and happy to see him, and it's all no big deal. Yeah, right.

There are some leaps, some illogical jumps in plot here, some transitions that don't flow or make sense. First Yancey is here, then he's not, then he's back, then he wants to print an article defending the Indians, then without knowing the outcome, 22 years have lapsed. Huh? Did I miss something? I don't know if we should scold Edna Ferber for this, but somehow I doubt it. You get the feeling that there were some excessively broad cuts to the original text to get it distilled down into movie form, sometimes without quite enough consideration for continuity or flow. Often it's implied, but sometimes, like in the jump from 1907 to 1929, much seems like it's glossed over, the timeline seems like it's speeding up exponentially, like they started to make the beginning of the film much more conscientiously, but they had a set amount of time allotted, and maybe midway through the filming realized that they'd only captured maybe 1/3 of the story and were going to have to cut and condense the remaining 2/3rds mercilessly.

In some ways, it's as if Edna Ferber's story were muckraking, as if she wanted to lift up every prejudice in front of society, and show (not tell) what was wrong with it. There are criticisms all over on the internet that this film is racist, which is absurdly simplistic. The film is full of racism, and prejudice, and sexism, but it's full of characters who embody those things -- that doesn't necessarily make it a racist or prejudiced or sexist film. That means it was a film that was meant to challenge people, challenge their preconceptions, challenge the preconceptions of the characters over the course of the film.

The character of the prostitute, Dixie Lee, was probably the most interesting to me. The actress who played her was probably one of the better members of the cast, and honestly, I'm just interested in the role of prostitution in the Old West. I did a little bit of reading about it over the summer, specifically about prostitution in Virginia City, Nevada, but I'm sure it was very similar all over. The story really isn't necessarily all that different from stories now, except that then it was even easier to fall out of society's norms and have but one option for subsistence left. Normal women with "decent" upbringings might experience one small mistake, one unfortunate twist of fate, and then suddenly theirs was a lot of shame and outsider living. And Dixie Lee, though she fought initially to find a place in a new frontier where she could start anew, she couldn't escape that caste once she had joined it.

With characters like Dixie Lee and even more with the character of Sabra, who spends most of her adult life going it alone an even ends up elected to Congress, there's a valuable, pointed commentary here too on female independence and strength. I dmean, really, Edna was hitting all the high notes, when you think of it.

It was interesting to watch the discovery of oil in Oklahoma, and to view it through modern eyes, as we creak under the current weight of $4 per gallon gas -- it made me want to reach back in time and shout, "Develop other alternatives! Do it now!!"

A few other random things, I guess:

1. Why do so many old movies have a character that stutters? Why was this a good form of comic relief? What's so funny about that? It's like it's some old bit that gets repeated over and over. Was it a vaudeville favorite? Was it considered a sign of something? I really just don't get it. I guess I just mostly don't think that stuttering is all that hilarious.

2. This was yet another Best Picture film in which the sound was pretty bad. Even with it turned up pretty high, I was still happy to be able to turn on the English subtitles so that I could read along when it was harder to hear.

3. In what I suppose is a potentially interesting side-note, I will mention that the history that spurred this film is actually my history too, I guess. My grandmother on my father's side was from Oklahoma, born in the 20s, a mixture of European and Cherokee ancestry. That doesn't necessarily mean I relate any better to this film than anyone else would, but it was instructive to realize, really late in the film I must admit, that this is in part the story of where I came from. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that, not on purpose, of course, but it's interesting to have the chance to do so.

4. Finally, it is also worth noting, if you consume two glasses while watching, as I did, you may shed a tear or two at the ending. I'm not so sure how it would go without wine. Perhaps it's better not to risk it...

#1b: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927/28)

2008-09-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

Winner of the 1927/28 award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture (aka Best Artistic Quality of Production) -- a category that existed only in the first year of the Academy Awards

Read an overview on Turner Classic Movies' Website here.
Read about it on the Internet Movie Database here.
Read a review on the Greatest Films website here. (By far the most thoughtful discussion of these three.)

Also, looks like Netflix is finally set to get this movie, as it is planned for release on DVD this coming December. I watched it on my DVR recorded from TCM. The Netflix page is worth checking out. There are a number of thoughtful member reviews there - which is kind of interesting, since the DVD isn't even available through Netflix, so you get reviews from people who watched the film through other means and took the time to discuss it.

And as always, there is quite a bit of interest to be found on Wikipedia, including interesting stuff about director F.W. Murnau and the cast.

There is one word that kept coming to mind as I did my preliminary research on and then subsequently watched this silent film: allegorical. The word sprang to mind even before I eventually found it spelled out in review form. The plot, the actions of the characters -- all seemed to be not realistic, but rather physical embodiment and portrayal of inner passions, desires, and struggles that might occur in any marriage. Well, hell, what do I know? Maybe other people in other relationships go out on rowboats with their spouses, are nearly killed by those spouses, flee to the big city, and then are persuaded that the spouse didn't really mean it by a big plateful of cakes, a lovely bouquet, and watching a brief marriage ceremony. When viewed literally, the events in the film seem almost ridiculous -- and I've read arguments from viewers who felt that taking the stance that the happenings in the film are unrealistic is to look at the film through a modern eye and to fail to place the film within its context as one should do. Well, to that stance, I answer with a single word that is also outmoded to the modern ear: poppycock. C'mon people, the film was made in 1927, not the middle ages. This was no more normal behavior then than it would be now. To me, the actions of the characters in the film only make sense when the whole is viewed as a parable. This is a "modern" day film-version of the old school Medieval morality play. The players embody the eternal struggle between good and evil in a way that might seem caricature if you encountered it in everyday life -- that's true now, and it was just as true in 1927. The protagonist must navigate these forces of good and evil, his devotion to his wife and baby versus the allure of the evil temptress, a struggle that becomes extended into the exterior world, as he battles against the forces of nature that threaten to drown him and his wife. The man's inner conflict is resolved, only then to be externalized and replayed by forces of nature in the form of a sudden storm, a capsized boat, and a desperate search for a wife suddenly lost.

I've seen the film called "fable-like" in a couple of places, and not to split literary hairs too much, but it's technically more of a parable than a fable -- no talking animals here! The film feels like it has been made with such intention -- it has the feel of someone consciously creating art, making choices about how to transform a literary work onto the screen in a way that retains the feel of a literary work. It is not intended to be a realistic representation of life, but rather a representation of the passions and emotions that fuel everyday life. I've studied German Expressionist cinema only a tiny bit, back in my Germanic Languages and Literature days (undergrad degree and then some graduate school). This film was certainly born of a great time in German cinema, and this could probably be called its introduction to American film. (As a sidebar, I was thinking about it, and I have had a hard time coming up with too many more current films that capture some of these literary, allegorical qualities. There are some, but it's not a mode that filmmakers very often successfully attempt -- perhaps Baz Luhrmann's version of Romeo and Juliet and the Coen Brothers' Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? come readily to mind, but there weren't many others that did.)

Immediately from the opening scenes, I really loved this film. It is visually arresting, and each scene continues to hold your interest throughout. The musical score is perfectly done, and the way that the music conveys the mood and plot and really almost serves as another invisible character -- seldom have I seen that done anywhere near as well. In modern film perhaps Brokeback Mountain comes close, but even it doesn't go quite so far as this, though music is so important throughout in both films. The integration of music and sound effects with the otherwise silent scenes of Sunrise conveys as much as, if not more, information and emotion than dialogue could. F. W. Murnau was such a filmmaking genius - his films leave such a strong mental trace for me. Watching this film brought immediately to mind the scenes and feel of another of his great films, the German film Nosferatu, one which I'd seen but largely forgotten until I watched this movie. For those who are not fans of silent films, especially because of all the reading, these films might be a great way to tap into the genre -- there are few things to read, few of those stereotypical placards between shots -- this is truly showing and not telling, sort of opera without the words, or a painting turned into a moving picture, or a relative of the way that ballet tells a story with nothing more than visuals and music. To read that Murnau studied art history and literature in his time at University comes as no surprise at all to someone watching this movie. Don't go looking here for realism, because it's symbolism that you'll find, and for some of the negative reviews I found on the Internet, it was quite clear to me that some of those reviewers were trying to interpret symbolism as realism, finding it ridiculous, and missing the point entirely. One person on IMDB wrote something along the lines of, "I can't help but wonder if it was such a good idea for The Woman to stay together with The Man, who clearly has murderous impulses up through the end -- it seems that Murnau may intend something much darker than the happy ending." (I'm paraphrasing the quote, so I probably don't have it exactly right.) Well, of course if this were real life, the woman shouldn't stay with a man with such murderous impulses always so near the surface. But these murderous impulses are intended to be symbolism of the dark and light impulses within us all, made external for the purposes of this film. It's not meant to be taken so literally, and doing so puts a twist on it that I don't believe Murnau intended. I suppose I return again to the morality play analogy -- the bigger message that comes through from all this symbolism is that The Man, having been faced with both good and evil, has worked his way through these challenges and chooses good in the end. One can struggle against dark inner impulses and emerge on the right side in the end. The psychological implications of a woman who chooses to stay with a man who almost murdered her and almost murdered another woman would most certainly make for a very interesting film -- but they are not the point of this film.

I am SO GLAD I discovered that this was also one of the Best Pictures in Academy Award history. If I'd only ever watched Wings, I think I would really have missed out. On the whole, if forced to choose one of the two, I'd pick this one as my favorite. It really does have amazing artistic quality. Even the little bits of comic relief were still funny, and at a couple points, I laughed out loud.

On a very shallow side note, I couldn't help but wish that Janet Gaynor hadn't had such a distractingly bad wig on, since it really just looked like some sort of a strange hat the entire time, but really, that's a pretty minor complaint that I can't say took away at all from my viewing experience. It's really just an aside.

All in all, I think this is a truly great film, and definitely worth tracking down. One of Murnau's films has been lost entirely, which is such a tragedy, but highlighted even more for me how glad I am that I was able to see this one.

#3: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)

2008-08-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

Winner of "Best Production" Category at the 1929/1930 Academy Awards (3rd annual ceremony)

After lots of Olympics and lots of life, I finally got a chance to sit down and watch All Quiet On the Western Front last Wednesday, August 27th.

The sound quality on the DVD wasn't spectacular, so I was happy to be able to turn on the subtitles.

I don't watch a lot of war movies, because, well...I know that war is stupid and pointless and apparently going to happen again and again. (Willa Cather probably said it best: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.") I can't stomach any movie that overly glorifies war, and as for a movie that highlights how stupid war really is, like I said, I know that. It's hard for me to watch a lot of pain and suffering in the limited time I have for my entertainment, because frankly, there's enough pain and suffering in the real world for my taste without having to see it on film or in theater, particularly if the movie or play does not help me somehow make sense of it all and order the world a little better.

And so it's interesting to me that the last two Best Picture films I have seen now have been about war, specifically World War I. Though the war had ended over a decade previous to the movie All Quiet on the Western Front, that didn't mean that people were done processing what had happened and trying to make sense of it all. Not to mention trying, like Erich Maria Remarque tried, to figure out how to never let such a terrible thing as a world war happen ever again. Perhaps they should have tried harder. And this film is such a contrast to Wings in many ways. I said above that I don't need a film to tell me that war is stupid, because i already know that -- but this is the original film that pointed out that war is stupid. And I don't think it would be exaggerating to call this film great -- it was important in its time, and it feels just as important today. I certainly will not be the first person to mention the fact that there is a timelessness to the message of pacifism, of the futility and absurdity and indignity and pointlessness of war. In the introduction, which was from TCM, the host Robert Osborne quotes someone who once said that all people in all countries should have to watch this movie once a year until the word war is eradicated from every language. Would that it were so easy...

I have to say that in the war scenes, particularly the trench scenes where the soldiers were being bombarded, all I wanted was for it to end, and I kept feeling an oppressive claustrophobia -- which means, I think, that they were perfectly done. There's no way to convey to the viewer the true feelings of the horrors of war, but these raw scenes filled with men soiling themselves, being injured and running wild causing their own deaths by running in sight of the enemy, freaking out after days of constant shelling and being unable to leave their literal rat holes -- they most certainly give the viewer at least a glimmer of understanding of what war must actually feel like. The scene in which the men in the bombarded underground bunker beat a swarm of rats to death with their shovels, seemingly relieved to have something to do besides wait to see if they would live or die, was truly horrifying.

The thing that I think was truly revolutionary about this film was the fact that it was a movie for a largely American audience in which the German enemy wasn't painted as villianous, or monstrous, or devils, or somehow larger than life, or anything like that. Instead, the German soldiers were rendered in exactly the same way that the French or American soldiers would have been rendered had it been from the other side's point of view -- as human, as scared kids trying not to get killed, going where they were told as if they were in a bad dream that would never end. This refusal to paint the other side as the bad guys is so profound (though certainly with a bad guy or two among them, just like in all countries -- Himmelstross, I'm looking at you). I mean, if you take a step back and think of this story as a story written by a German man based on his own war experience and put it back into his context, then it makes sense. But the fact that it was made into an American film is where the profundity creeps in. You didn't need to be one nationality or another to relate to and understand this film. It didn't matter whether the soldiers' helmets were pointy on top and they reported to the Kaiser or not. The story could be adopted by American audiences because it wasn't a German story -- it was everyone's story. I mean, could there be any more striking scene than the soldier blown apart by a hand grenade, with nothing more visible than his arms clutching a barbed wire fence? No helmet, no patches, no country any longer. Just an unnatural and terrifying moment that no human being should ever have to witness, those remnants of arms that could be anyone's arms.

I'll end this with a great quote that was perhaps my favorite from the movie: "Every full-grown emperor needs one war to make him famous." Even when those emperors happen to be elected officials, I would not hesitate to add.

#1a: Wings (1927/28)

2008-08-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

Winner of "Best Production" category at the 1927/28 Academy Awards (the 1st annual Academy Awards ceremony)
Ceremony Held: May 16, 1929
Winners had been named 3 months earlier
Only time ceremony was not broadcast in some way
Academy Awards were born "the year sound was born" in the movies
(with thanks to The Greatest Films for the details)

Well, I wasn't kidding when I said this was a very slow movie marathon. However, I finally had a chance to sit down and watch another Best Picture Academy Award-winning film today, Wings. This film is commonly referred to as the first movie to win the award for Best Picture, but that's actually somewhat inaccurate -- it actually took away the award for Best Production. There was a second category in that first year, Best Artistic Quality of Production, or Best Unique and Artistic Picture, which is why I am considering Wings #1a. The film Sunrise, which won the award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, rightfully ought to be considered the co-winner for Best Picture, in my opinion, particularly as that category seems to bear just as much resemblance to the current Best Picture category as the Best Production category did. So, at any rate, I'm planning to watch and write a little bit about both films.

I found it surprising that this, or any other Academy Award-winning picture, might be difficult to find, but Wings does appear to be a bit difficult to locate on DVD. I'm trying to get as many of these films as possible via Netflix, but this one was not. It looked as if it might be possible to pick up a copy in VHS format, at the very least, but rather than buying it, I lucked out and located it playing on TCM, so I set the DVR to record it, and voila.

Perhaps at least part of the reason this film isn't in much demand, and therefore more difficult to find, is that many people, like me, don't much understand or relate to silent films. After all, movies with sound were around by the time my grandparents were young children -- so it's three generations before me that would have really gone to a lot of silent films. Also, I don't know why, but I am often surprised at just how LONG many of the silent films I have seen are. Wings is a good 2 hours and 20 minutes. I hear people complain that movies "nowadays" are getting longer and longer, but clearly, this is not a new phenomenon. Still, despite this, I would like to better understand silent film, and I think that this one was a good one to delve into. It seems particularly momentous to me that the dawn of the Oscars also truly heralded the end of the great silent film era. This was the first and last year that the Best Picture award(s) went to a silent film. Upon reflection, I suppose it does make some sense that silent films had to be so long -- you had to see the scene, and then you had to read the dialogue, adding just a bit of time to each scene throughout the movie.

I'm actually a little surprised to report that I enjoyed Wings a lot more than I would have anticipated. I tend to think of many silent films as overdone (so much emoting!), or unrealistic, or ... something. And yet there were many scenes and moments in this film that were really quite realistic and some that were even very poignant and touching. Ultimately, it's a tale of friendship love, and war, and the sacrifices that people make in the name of all of those things. A lot of times, it seems difficult to me to reconcile and relate what I see in a silent film to what life was probably actually like, real people, having real things happen to them. But this film succeeded more than some I've seen in making me believe that it was at least a little bit reflective of real life, World War I, as depicted from the viewpoint of the 1920s. I'll chime right in with what many other reviewers have said, as well, which is that the flying scenes are quite amazing -- no special effects here, or at least very few. The two leading men did their own flying, both in the film and in real life (this info, courtesy their IMDB bios, as well as other film sites -- check the margin for links to ones I've used.) Such a thing would be completely unheard of now in a world where actors doing ANY of their own stunt work are incredibly few and far between...maybe Jackie Chan and a handful of others. Good grief. nowadays, many actors don't even do their own "butt work." So it does seem that there's something a lot purer and more organic about people deciding to tell a story in a movie, and so they act it out to some degree as if they were living it, flying the planes and all. They probably had some fun blowing stuff up as well -- I can't imagine how dangerous these kinds of early stunts, explosions, and fires were -- I'm certain that technology has changed massively in that arena.

The other thing that really struck me about the flying scenes was that if this is really what flying in WWI was like (and how should I know, I certainly wasn't there!), then it really is some crazy, daredevil stuff. Those planes look like little haphazard death traps, if you ask me. But then, I suppose I'm one to occasionally get a bit freaked out on commercial airliner flights. And war is so stupid, yo. (Which makes me look forward to watching Oscar Winner #3, All Quiet On the Western Front, a movie bearing pretty much the same message.) Loved the crazy shot of men shoving bombs onto planes with their bare hands -- which is probably exactly how it went down, and which I can't imagine happening now. It's interesting to me as well, to see WWI from a viewpoint scarcely a decade later, because I've recently been reading the Maisie Dobbs series of mysteries, in which the female detective is a private investigator who was a nurse in WWI about a decade previous to the action of the books, and much of the plots and themes of those stories deals with WWI and its aftermath. So it's interesting to get a chance to compare WWI through a modern vision to WWI as represented by its contemporaries. It does seem to me that WWI must have been one of the most horrific wars, as technology far outpaced the mechanics of actual warfare -- fighting in the old way, but with new, even deadlier weapons.

Now, all this isn't to say that there isn't some bad acting or some silly-looking effects to modern eyes in this film. But for what the filmmakers had to work with at the time, it really is pretty good. Okay, the bubbles scenes were weird and lame, those "special effects" I could have done without. People don't get THAT crazy when they're drunk, unless that was absinthe in those glasses... But I can overlook a few missteps.

I really enjoyed Clara Bow in this film (she's so cute! I can understand why she was beloved), and from what little biographical info I read about her on IMDB, I'd be interested in reading more, so maybe I'll see if there are any biographies out there. Hers is such an interesting story -- such unlikely beginnings, such atypical behavior even when she was famous, and then sad things later in life as well, like struggles with mental illness, possibly schizophrenia.

Also, I can certainly see why Charles "Buddy" Rogers was nicknamed "America's Boyfriend" -- that dude was good-looking!

At any rate, I'm overall very happy that I got a chance to see this film. I certainly recommend it, and I hope it will make its way to readily-available DVD soon.

#2: The Broadway Melody (of 1929) (1928/29)

2008-07-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Broadway Melody, later referred to as The Broadway Melody of 1929 to distinguish it from subsequent installments made in the 30s and 40s, won the Academy Award for Best Picture (which at the time was actually called Best Production) in the 1928/1929 Academy Awards, held on April 30th, 1930. It was the first non-silent film ("talkie") to win the award for Best Picture, and interestingly, it was originally planned to be partially silent, but things were going so well during the filming that it was decided to make the whole thing a "talkie." You can read all sorts of interesting stuff about it at IMDB, The Greatest Films, and Turner Classic Movies.

I watched it this afternoon, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say I loved it or was mightily impressed, I liked it well enough. I thought it was a decent effort for a bunch of movie stars who were making the hard transition from silent films, who were apparently being combined with vaudeville stars who had experience doing things like singing, dancing, and, er, actually talking on screen. Bessie Love was my favorite, starring as "Hank," a tiny spitfire of a woman who gave a pretty decent performance, though in the end, she was all noble and self-sacrificing when her lousy boyfriend (IMHO) fell in love with her supposedly much more beautiful sister. Okay, let's just say this movie isn't extremely heavy on plot, but then that's not what you'd expect from a movie entitled "Broadway Melody" -- you'd expect a flimsy plot as a delivery vehicle for some singing and dancing. The singing and dancing was interesting -- somehow, I would expect 1929 to be more prudish, even though I know that's not really realistic. I also find that I relate better to movies from the 40s and even the 30s than I do to movies from the 20s. It's a strange phenomenon that I found a little bit while I was watching this show. It recalled to mind watching a Katherine Hepburn silent film with my grandma, who was born in 1923. The movie was probably made when my grandma was only a few years old, and she'd never seen it before. It was REALLY long. And neither of us really "got" it -- we just couldn't quite relate to it. In the end, I sort of shrugged and said, "Well, grandma, I guess it was just before our time." Which was funny, but maybe there's something to that.

At any rate, I'm just rambling, giving a stream of consciousness about my impressions of the film. I watched it on DVD from Netflix. You can read much more lucid reviews of the film elsewhere on the internet, such as through the links I've already given above. My most interesting piece of trivia that I took away from my web surfing about the film is that Anita Page, who starred as Queenie, is still alive -- she's 97 years old, about to turn 98 on August 4th, and she is considered the last living silent film star by some on the internet, at least. Also, she used to reportedly get fan mail from Moussolini.

At the very least, the film was worth watching. It's definitely a glimpse into an era that I know little about -- and I consider myself to be relatively well versed (at least more than most other people) in "old movies." This makes me realize that there are a couple eras of film that I know very little about, and I'd be interested to explore more.

PS - If you get the DVD, don't miss the special features. There's a very bizarre short, The Dogway Melody, which is a parody acted entirely by DOGS. I couldn't quite tell if they were walking the whole time like circus dogs, or if some of it was done marionette-style with wires, though I expect it was mainly the latter. I confess that I watched a lot of the Metro Movietone Revues in fast forward, but my personal favorites were the two performances from the Ponce Sisters. And it was interesting to watch the trailers for the future Broadway Melodies. Because for one thing, nobody in this film could hold a performing candle to some of the latter performers, including of course Fred Astaire. Okay, that's enough from me for now.

One film down, lots more to go. Next up: All Quiet on the Western Front.

Learning a Lot Already

2008-07-20T10:19:00.001-07:00

When I get into something new, I basically develop some degree of obsession. And this is no exception, I suppose. I realize that I am certainly not the first person to want to watch all the Academy Award winning films, by any means. Clearly, there are way bigger film buffs than I, who have seen them all. However, I do find it disappointing that some of the early ones are so difficult to find. I am learning that many of the early films weren't well preserved, and in fact because early film contained a lot of nitrate, it breaks down relatively quickly and what we have to watch today often has had to be pieced together from multiple copies, sometimes with segments being lost entirely. I'd vaguely known this before, but it still seems a shame that what were deemed the most important films less than a hundred years ago are more or less forgotten by almost everybody nowadays.

At any rate, I've discovered an interesting website, which I've added to the sidebar -- The Greatest Films. It is through this website that I learned that in the first year of the Oscars, there were actually two films that could be considered as the Best Picture winner. This is due to the fact that the categories hadn't really settled into what we have now at that time. In the first years, and also what is shown on the official Academy Award website as the Best Picture, was really the category of Best Production. So the film shown on Netflix and the Academy Award site as the Best Picture film for the years 1927/28 (awarded in 1929), Wings, received the Best Production award, while another film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, received the same year's award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture (a.k.a Best Artistic Quality of Production), as far as I can tell, a category that is perhaps more equivalent to the current Best Picture category than the Best Production category. However, this category only existed in the first year of the Oscars, and that's probably why it's being dropped from some of the official annals of Oscar history, although that is a total shame if you ask me.

At any rate, clearly, I need to add Sunrise to my viewing list in my quest to watch all the Best Picture awardees. And, no surprise, it is not readily available. Netflix allows me to save it in my queue, for whenever it is released, which is "unknown." IMDB tells me that it isn't widely available on DVD, but that it will be played on Turner Classic Movies on September 2, 2008 at 10 AM EST, but that's via a commentor. I'll have to see if I can confirm that otherwise and queue it up on the DVR when the time comes, I suppose. Sheesh, you'd think watching these movies would really just be a matter of making the time and sitting down to do so, but in fact, it's much more difficult than that, I guess.

Ah, well, the commentor on IMDB wasn't too far off. The TCM schedule is up on their website for September, and it shows that the movie is playing at 9 AM MST where I am, and it will even e-mail me a reminder. How handy. I've got to say, TCM is fantastic. This makes me believe that eventually, they really do play everything...

To read some really interesting stuff about the first Academy Awards, make sure to vist that Greatest Films website. C'mon, you know you want to geek out with me. Some of the most interesting factoids there include the fellow nominees who did not win (in that year, referred to as Honorable Mentions), some of which film history considers greater films than the winners (hey, we all know that feeling from recent Academy Award ceremonies, which do sometimes feel more like popularity contests...), and also really interesting commentary about snubs, some of which seem worth watching as well. Okay, it just adds more to the ol' to-do list, but it IS interesting. It is also interesting (though likely not entirely coincidental) that the Academy Awards basically occurred at the dawn of sound in the motion picture industry. The first years awardees were almost exclusively in silent film -- the only award to a non-sound film was confined to its own category because it was felt unfair to have the silent films compete with "talkies" -- so it really signals the end of an era. And don't even get me started on the internet research tangent this set me off on about Mary Pickford! Go on one of your own sometime, because it's really quite interesting...

At any rate, the first two Best Picture films, Wings and Sunrise, will have to be watched totally out of order, after July 27th and September 2nd, respectively. And when I move on to watching the Best Director films, I'll have to remember that there were also two Best Director categories in that first year, for Drama and Comedy...

A Strange Plan

2008-07-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

After watching this year's Academy Awards, I realized I hadn't seen the Academy Award winners for a few years. I noticed, specifically, when I looked at the Academy Award website, that over the past 20+ years, I had usually seen at least the Best Picture award winner, but then for the last 3 or 4, I'd missed them entirely. Which got me thinking that it would entertain me greatly to watch all of the Best Picture winners, since the Oscars began, in order. Because I'm that kind of a geek.

Enter Netflix. Last week I subscribed, and this week I'm ready to start my very slow movie marathon. I've already run into a snag, due to the fact that the first year's winner, Wings, does not yet appear to be available on DVD, at least not via Netflix. So either I'd need to search it out elsewhere, either on VHS or DVD, which is possible, but probably difficult, or else start with #2.

Wait a minute, what luck! I just searched IMDB, and I see that it's playing on Turner Classic Movies on July 28th at midnight!! Okay, so I can record it with my DVR and watch it too. It will probably be slightly out of order, but that's okay.

At any rate, I thought to myself, well, if I'm on this crazy quest to watch these all, then I may as well document it in a blog. Because that's what the post-modern woman would do, right? Maybe make a post for each film, and discuss what I thought of it? So that's the tentative plan. Stay tuned for more, I guess...