The Last Ten

Make that seven (as of June 15).

Doctor Dolittle (1967). So many things baffle me. Let's start with Rex Harrison. (1) Musicals have people singing. (2) Rex Harrison cannot sing. (3) So why keep putting Rex Harrison in musicals? It's just illogical.

Ordinary People (1980). Holy hell, I really loved this movie. Full review coming at some point.

Imitation of Life (1934). Wow. It's not the best of its field (that would be It Happened One Night), but it's close. Everyone is so great, from Claudette Colbert to Warren William to Ned Sparks (so sad there was no Supporting Actor category yet) to Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington. And that funeral scene—wow.

Becket (1964)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
The Dresser (1983)
Hold Back the Dawn (1941)
Seventh Heaven (1927)
Nashville (1975)
Gone with the Wind (1939)

(Eleven, really, but The Patriot (1928) is lost, so I'll never see it.)

This is the approximate order in which I plan to watch them. The last two are set in stone; any suggestions/favorites/least favorites among the other eight?

Short Takes

Jet Li is the patron saint of elegant, physics-defying wire-fu. Jackie Chan is the patron saint of a knock-down, drag-out, near-comedic form of the martial art. The prospect that they would finally, near the end of their respective careers (Li is 45, Chan is 54), do a film together was incredibly inviting. I was excited to see such a film. I'd have gone opening night. The fact that the vehicle chosen featured a gawky white kid transported back in time dampened my enthusiasm only a little: it's still Jackie Chan facing off against Jet Li, a battle between philosophies of filmmaking and of stunt work. I imagined an epic battle in which Chan fends off a graceful, flying Li with pieces of a broken stepladder and a dustpan. Then I saw the trailer. Jackie Chan's on wires, doing triple back-flips. I'm crushed; I'm staying home.

Self-Styled Siren offers an impassioned defense of melodrama. I was a tad confused at first; many of the films mentioned in her essay and in the articles she links to wouldn't fit my definition of melodrama. Then I realized that if I love a film, I wouldn't call it a melodrama; thus, it must be that "melodrama" is a label I reserve for films I don't like.

But my real issue is with the Tom O'Neil article that prompted her essay: he says that "Oscar Nazis" (his ill-chosen and hysterically repeated phrase) insist that Sunrise is the first "real" Best Picture Winner, instead of Wings. Of course we know that the Oscars had two apparent "Best" categories back then, and neither of them was called "Best Picture." But the Acadmey has long since cleared up the confusion: Wings won the first Best Picture Oscar, and Sunrise won an award that was discontinued the next year. It's their award ceremony, so they get to decide. My question is, what "Oscar Nazis" are attempting to change this? I know quite a few Oscar obsessives, and none of them has ever made this argument in my presence. Any discussion of the relative importance of the two categories seeks to elevate Sunrise to an equal plane, not a superior one. (Of course I mean in terms of Oscar importance, not in terms of quality.) So who is Tom O'Neil talking to, except himself?

In an attempt to help parents decide whether their children should see a particular film, Kids In Mind catalogs each film's potentially offensive content. It's a noble gesture, I suppose, but it results in unintentionally hilarious reading. The Big Lebowski: "Reckless driving, lots of scenes of property damage. A frenzied ferret is thrown into a tub with a man and nearly scratches and hurts the man as a result. Threatening with a gun." Bad Santa: "A woman wears a low-cut top that reveals cleavage, and a woman wears a short top and low-cut pants that reveal bare abdomen and cleavage. A man lies in a bathtub and we see bare shoulders and legs and a boy sits in the room with him (nothing sexual)."

Best Actress Corrective Drive Volume 1

Unlike many of my favorite bloggers, I am not an actressexual. I unjustly ignore the finest females the Oscars have to offer. There are two notable holes in my Oscar obsession: Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. To put it bluntly, in numbers: I've seen 72% of the Best Supporting Actors but only 65% of the Best Supporting Actresses, and 73% of the Best Actors but a lowly 59% of the Best Actresses. The "why" is easy: the Best Picture nominees, which have been my primary focus, contain more solid, nomination-attracting roles for men than they do for women, and I'm not especially drawn to the kinds of films that tend to earn lone Best Actress nominations. But I'm in the process of repenting by making a concerted effort to watch enough of my remaining Best Actress nominees that I don't have to feel ashamed when the Oscar conversation comes around to percentages (and it always does).

So far, the results have been iffy: one pretty darned good, if overpraised, performance in a film that made me want to throw things at my TV; one nearly unwatchable performance in a film that is nearly unbearable; and an intermittently great performance in a patchy, made-for-TV-style film. Finally, though, a pioneering women-in-prison flick saved me from utter despair.

Diane Lane, Unfaithful (2002)
Lost to Nicole Kidman, The Hours
Performance: 3 goats, film: 0.5 goats

Although she gives it her all, Diane Lane can't save Unfaithful from its need to pin all the problems of the world on women's unfettered sexuality. No, I'm not overstating the case: this film actually sees a moral equivalency between a woman intentionally an affair and a man murdering his wife's lover. "What did you do?" a horrified Lane asks her husband Richard Gere; "What did you do?" he shoots back, and the film is on his side. That said, Lane's performance is half showy and half naturalistic. There are the obvious "Oscar scenes," like her hundred-expression trip down memory lane on the way home from her first assignation and the aforementioned horror at hubby, during which she shows a nice range of mannerisms that all the same announce themselves as mannerisms. She's better in the loose, playful (though sometimes borderline-idiotic) seduction scenes, in which she's basically the only actor in the film, as Olivier Martinez gives her as much to play off as a sculpture would.

Maggie McNamara, The Moon Is Blue (1953)
Lost to herself Audrey Hepburn, Roman Holiday
Performance: 2.5 goats; film: 2 goats

Maggie McNamara is in full Audrey Hepburn-as-plucky innocent mode; if, by the last reel, you're not calling her "Audrey" in your head, you're a better movie watcher than I. McNamara would have been fine, I guess, if Hepburn hadn't already hoed this row. She's playing a naïf who produces "shocking" statements about sexuality to the delight and/or horror of those surrounding her. Childlike in deportment, dress, and speech, she produces "virgin," "seduce," and "mistress" for the first time on movie screens, but the conceit of her character softens the blow each time: it's a shock, I suppose, but it's the shock of a child asking her mommy "what's intercourse?" instead of the knowing and subversive shock I think the playwright intended. The film repeatedly trips over its self-conscious daring, and William Holden reminds me again why I hate him, with few exceptions, between Sunset Blvd. and The Wild Bunch.

Jane Alexander, Testament (1983)
Lost to Shirley MacLaine, Terms of Endearment
Performance: 3 goats; film: 2.5 goats

I'm going to join the small but distinguished group of people (OK, one other person and his household) who don't share the adoration of Jane Alexander's performance or her film Testament, the tale of domestic nuclear apocalypse that was made for TV but released in theaters. The film itself is barely competent: it contains some great scenes, and then huge misfires, especially that cemetery kiss, the teddy bear hunt, and the gimmicky late-movie reveal of Daddy Devane's Final Call. Blech. Alexander's performance is the best thing in it, but it's a careful, studied performance in search of a real movie to inhabit, and nearly sunk by two ill-advised scenes of histrionics (see above). She's so much better at shell-shocked waiting and quiet determination than she is at screeching. Her performance is clearly the weakest of the '83 nominees I've seen (although I haven't seen Educating Rita).

Eleanor Parker, Caged (1950)
Lost to Billie Holliday, Born Yesterday
Performance: 4 goats; film: 4 goats

And finally, an outstanding film featuring most of a great performance: Eleanor Parker plays a naive girl processed by a corrupt prison machinery into a hardened crook. By "most of a good performance," I mean that the beginning and the ending are exceptional; it's the middle that's lacking. Parker transforms from a quaking child into a flinty con (with a weird but stunning stopover in Falconetti-as-Joan of Arc territory) over the space of a single scene change: she's denied parole, she freaks out, and then she's a spitting tigress, trading hair-pulls with Hope Emerson's formidable prison matron. But it's too sudden; there's no buildup to the transformation. This is more the screenplay's fault than Parker's, of course—given the script's limitations, Parker's inclusion in the best Best Actress lineup in Oscar history (Baxter and Davis in All About Eve, Swanson in Sunset Blvd., and winner Holliday in Born Yesterday) is well deserved.

Children in Exile

My friend Chris Swider's documentary Children in Exile (trailer) has its Chicago premiere at the Gallery Theater next Friday, April 18, at 7:00. Chris will be there to answer questions.

From the press release:

Children in Exile focuses on a lesser-known World War II tragedy, the deportation of millions of Polish children and teenagers to Soviet Siberia. While the atrocities carried out by the Nazis are well documented, this Soviet enacted crime has been relatively ignored by historians and filmmakers alike - until now. Interviews with actual survivors of the tragedy, coupled with historic photographs and artistic renderings of the terrible event, make for a chilling and heart-wrenching movie experience.

Those "artistic renderings" are artworks made by schoolchildren after a classroom visit by some of the survivors. It's a unique way of attempting to show, from a child's-eye view, what life was like in the gulag.

The film has already screened at the 10th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, the San Luis Obispo Film Festival (where it won the Best Short Documentary award), the Anchorage International Film Festival, and several other venues.

Waxing Poetic about BloodRayne 2: Deliverance

For my entry in Lucid Screening's Second Annual White Elephant Blog-a-Thon, I decided against a simple angry rant, which was my first, instinctive response to my assignment, Uwe Boll's BloodRayne 2: Deliverance, which is about a half-vampire fighting against a vampiric Billy the Kid in the Wild West. Instead, I wrote poems: one sonnet (Shakespearean, not Italian), two limericks, a villanelle, and a sestina. I chose these forms (well, except the limericks) to give the impression of structure and perhaps deep thought and skill, which would likely not have resulted had I chosen blank verse. Perhaps they still elude me. On to the poems.

Shall I Compare Thee to an Uwe Boll Film?

The vampire outlaw William Bonney wreaks
a trail of carnage spread across the West
(but of his Slavic accent we'll not speak).
But he's just BloodRayne 2's especial guest:
Natassia Malthe is the "dhamphir" Rayne;
be-sworded, bosomed, clad in leather cloak,
she's out for vengeance, dealing death and pain
to Bill the Kid and his undead cowpokes.
Director Uwe Boll is widely booed:
"incompetent"? Inadequately cruel.
Anachronism reigns! Ineptitude
of acting, scripting, lensing is the rule.
This film's a minor cinematic crime
entirely unworthy of my rhymes.

The Lass from Oslo

There once was an actress named Malthe.
In BloodRayne her presence is paltry.
Her waist is quite slim
but her acting is grim
and quite limited her career shall be.

She's entirely too soft-spoken.
She pales next to Kristanna Lokken.
She's not half as pretty,
her accent is shitty,
and her ass-kicking skills appear broken.

Do Not Go Gentle Into an Uwe Boll Film

My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell
for bringing forth another BloodRayne flick!
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel!

I'd rather choose to face armed personnel,
or Montresor to wall me up with bricks.
My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell!

Each line the actors speak is a death knell;
the overacting hams lay it on thick.
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel.

Film art is absent, vision, skill as well;
technique's the very opposite of slick.
My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell!

I'd vote to give this film a Prix Nobel
but there's no prize for cinematic ick.
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel!

At nothing does the cast or crew excel.
Just watching left me feeling vaguely sick.
My eyes! God damn that Uwe Boll to hell!
Such horrors from my mind I can't dispel!

There Are No Well-Known Sestina Titles to Infest with Uwe Boll

You'll say I'm too hard on this movie
and perhaps you're right.
It's not, after all, trying to be great cinema;
it's just a straight-to-video sequel
that appeals to a certain collection
of people who will excuse its flaws.

But should they excuse those flaws?
Did they? It's in the bottom 100 movies
on the IMDB, an illustrious collection,
and while I'm not sure its placement there is right,
it's certainly a pointless and unskilled sequel
to a film that was itself a blight on the cinema.

(I don't understand the subset of cinema
that's "supposed to be bad"; if the flaws
of this BloodRayne sequel
are intentional, why is the movie
not funny? Because comedy is the only right
venue for intentional gaffes; this collection

of gaffes is unfunny.) So is a growing collection
of BloodRayne films inevitable, then? Will the cinema,
or at least home video, support Uwe Boll's right
(backed up by his fists) to slather his directorial flaws
on the screen in another half-dressed half-vampire movie?
Can he find a distributor for another sequel?

What a stupid question. Another sequel
likely featuring Malthe and a collection
of has-beens will bore and annoy movie
audiences in 2009. I'm sure the cinema
will survive; it's survived more disastrous flaws
than Uwe Boll can perpetrate. That's right:

Uwe Boll is harmless. People in their right
minds ignore him. Real damage comes from mindless sequels
bolstered by kadillion-dollar budgets and a flawed,
strictly commercial mindset. The collected
films of Brett Ratner, Michael Bay, et al. do more harm to the cinema
because studios hold up as triumphs their shitbag movies.

So let Uwe Boll make movies. Let him do a hundred BloodRayne sequels.
It's his right (plus he'll beat you up if you argue). Cinema's
real enemies perpetrate worse flaws. Michael Bay is in the Criterion Collection.