CIMMfest Is Pretty Much Unstoppable Now

The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival is starting just over a week from now, on Thursday, March 4. Ye gods. There's too much great stuff going on to explain here, so I'll summarize:

Robyn Hitchcock Jon Langford Grant Hart Tom Ze White Rappers From Montana Keith Phipps Seattle Soul Of Montreal Stradivarius Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Mucca Pazza Penny Arcade DJ Spooky Tinariwen Complaints Choir Polkaholics Trimpin Ngawang Choephel Sarah Weis El Sistema Stecher & Horowitz Bono Marie Losier Ivan Kral Madsen Minax Quincy Jones Snoop Dogg Nick Cave Iranian Rappers Naked Lunch Vacationeers King Pluto's Whispering Choir Todd Giglio Sissyboy Lawrence Peters Paul Stanley Serj Tankian Mogwai Mountain Goats Sigur Ros... and more.

Download a program (big file).

Help the Best Fest in Chicago Happen

That's the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival (CIMMfest), and I'm not just saying that because I program the films. We have Robyn Hitchcock, Genesis P-Orridge, Jon Langford, Grant Hart, and DJ Spooky on the mic, and the Mountain Goats, Mogwai, the Complaints Choir, Stecher & Horowitz, Patti Smith, Paul Stanley, Basque separatists, transgendered musicians, white rappers from Montana, Serj Tankian, Tibetan political prisoners, and the inventor of reggae on the screen.

That said, we could use some cash. We have a matching grant, so every dollar you give means two dollars. From our director: "If you haven't heard of the program, it allows even the smallest on-line donation to be put towards our modest fundraising goal of $2500. It is term based, and if the goal is not reached in the term, NO ONE IS CHARGED A DIME!" Doesn't that sound nice? Wouldn't you like to throw in a few dimes?

Donate here.

From an Anonymous Reader

Your review of Avatar was irresponsible. It sent a critical message to others.

From this point on, I have blocked your website for my family and I have instructed my IT department to block your site for the entirety of my business operations.

I have also told friends and colleagues to avoid your site.

Lecter at the Lectern: BPFTOI #17

Don't call it a comeback, we've been here for years... or what seems like years between episodes. But, gentle readers (and not-so-gentle ones), we're back after less than a month with the next episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In (previous episodes). This time around, we have Going My Way and The Silence of the Lambs, two films that... well, that have pretty much defeated my attempts to come up with parallels between them, as we so enjoy doing here at BPFTOI. Aside from the fact that both films won lots of Oscars, and several of the same ones, they don't have much in common.

Back in 1944, in the waning days of World War II, Oscar voters rejected adulterous murder, unsolved murder, the homefront, and a US president in favor of a simple story of how being good and charming and having a great singing voice can get you out of whatever problems you might have. It won seven Oscars, including Bing Crosby for Best Actor. And in 1991, in the waning days of the Reagan era, Oscar voters rejected Bugsy, Beauty, Babs, and JFK in favor of the most violent film to win Best Picture, a film about a plucky, strong female character and a couple of savage killers. It won five Oscars, including Anthony Hopkins for Best Actor.

And there's my admittedly weak starting point: both films feature leading male characters with whom I have some serious problems. Leaving aside the fact that Hopkins is onscreen less than a quarter of the film's running time (it's silly to get your stopwatch out—he's clearly a leading role whatever his screen time), I was surprised at how many problems I had with Hannibal Lecter, and with how the film chose to portray him as some kind of charming, evil, superpowered demigod. I greatly prefer Brian Cox's portrayal in Manhunter, and that film's treatment of Lecter as an evil, dangerous guy—and that's it. No stone-walled dungeon, no dramatically swelling music as he analyzes his opponent, no obsessive closeups, no overly stylized delivery. Hopkins's Lecter is like a serial killer as imagined by Shakespeare with dialog by David Mamet. I fully realize that Demme and co. were going for a sort of Grand Guignol, operatic tone, and I think my objections to Hopkins aren't as strong as they might sound, but the part bothered me quite a bit.

And over in Going My Way, Bing Crosby is pretty much asleep. Sure, he was up against a weak field (with Charles Boyer leading the pack in Gaslight), but this has to be one of the laziest Best Actor wins in the history of the category. I like the film, but do not love it (although my mild like probably looks like love from where you guys are standing), and its conception of Faddah O'Malley is so limited as to make it possible to sum him up in a word: saint. Or yawn.

Nick: I thought of two more parallels! If it weren't for the Barry Fitzgerald problem, after which AMPAS made it impossible to be nominated for two acting awards in the same year, Hopkins surely would have been for Lambs. And while Lambs is about a cannibal, Going My Way is about fellas who take communion, i.e., eat the body and blood of Christ. Honk if you think that's in terrible taste. So to speak! I just can't get over it.

I know what you mean about Lecter, Mike, and the movie has dropped just a bit over time in my estimation, partly for that reason. The performance is so technically exquisite and controlled, but its leering panache would be harder to stomach (stomach!) if the movie didn't so badly need some levity and if Hopkins didn't make Lecter so genuinely frightening and vicious in the moments he needs to be. It's clear that the conception of the character is entirely axiomatic: he just IS this pure embodiment of evil genius, of unfettered powers of knowing, of psychopathic charisma, of chillingly effete aplomb. It's impossible to imagine him having any of the prior life experience which is attributed to him, or even having any prior life at all. Again, it's amazing that it works, and even beyond Hopkins's devilish facility, I have to cede a lot of credit to Foster, who plays their interactions in such a completely earnest key of discomfort, strained formality, reluctant fascination, and intellectual fortitude that Hannibal doesn't just become The Show in and of himself, but actually gets pulled deeply into a pretty transfixing relationship. The lensing and staging of their exchanges also strikes me as pretty brilliant. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto was one of the great unsung heroes of this film at Oscar time. The glass wall of the cell really redeems the Grimm stoniness of the rest of the jail set.

I have more to say about Lambs, and about Going My Way, which I might like a smidge more than you're expecting, but Nathaniel, whaddya think about Lecter?

Nathaniel: I take Jack Crawford's (Scott Glenn) advice very seriously: "Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head." The truth is, the thing I love most about The Silence of the Lambs is what Mike takes issue with: how Super!Evil!Gothic! it is. I'm not sure I could take it if didn't have the barrier, if you will, of stylization. To me that's the glass wall with airholes in it. And I like it that way just fine. Because even with the distancing (albeit hugely enjoyable) theatricality, it's a damn freaky movie. Eighteen years later I'm still surprised it won the Oscar ...though I'd disagree that it's the most violent one. That'd be Braveheart.

I agree that Lecter is less a character than an abstraction. But it humors me, when I'm in the right cynical mood, that he's so widely regarded as the Best Evil Character Ever when he's such a successful personification of Hollywood's dependably committed Anti-Intellectualism. People who are smart, educated and artistically inclined (and British!) are scaaaarrrrrrry. Boo!

Nick: Ha! True. Although a great obverse of that is the much less typical implication, via this movie, that people with noteworthy accents from small towns in Appalachia are, or can be, resourceful, gutsy, and perspicacious, as opposed to the frequent Hollywood arrogance of treating entire swaths of the country as backward and entrapping and/or as completely sentimentalized and/or pitiable.

Mike: One thing that jumped out at me was when Lecter tries to get a rise out of Starling by making fun of her accent, which he accuses her of unsuccessfully trying to hide. It's the only place, I think, where he was 100% wrong about her—her accent was obvious and unhidden, and she barely flinched when he brought it up. More power to the film for having its main character refuse to take that particular bait. Anyway, you were saying?

Nick: People still talk and write a lot about what a breakthrough Clarice Starling was (and remains) as a new kind of female archetype for this kind of story, and I agree. But I think she's just as much of a trailblazer—without the movie getting too plumped-up about it—in terms of a heroic, smart, risk-taking, and exciting audience surrogate with her strongly marked class and regional background. Even the scenes in Ohio and West Virginia when Starling and the other agents are investigating the wave of killings avoid most of the usual forms of condescension, and I love the ways they're lit and directed. The film seems to spend barely any time on Bill's victims or their families and survivors, and yet the empathy it conjures for all of them feels very real and earned.

While we're on this point of archetypal representation, the elephant in the room might be the Crazy! Killer! (Not Quite) Tranny!. But I have to admit I've never felt too affronted by this extremely specific characterization, and I think Ted Levine's acting as Buffalo Bill is really clever and daring. I loved when Demme singled him out in his Oscar speech, even if it was a defensive move. The stark downgrade from Lambs to Philadelphia exemplifies to me what can happen when artists get scared out of bold, go-for-broke depictions of surprising, highly individual characters and cast their lot defensively with bland, depersonalized paragons.

Nathaniel: Bland depersonalized paragons?!? You're segueing to Going My Way already?

Nick: Rest easy, girl, I wasn't even going there. Though I can see how you would make that mistake. I was just thinking how much more pissed off I get by Tom not kissing and barely touching Antonio Banderas (Antonio Banderas!) than I do by Buffalo Bill trying to work out his psychosexual traumas through his abject melange of flaying, dancing, primping, candy-tucking, and innovative seamstressing.

Mike: That highlights what an odd Best Picture winner Silence is, in that it was so obviously not conceived as such—I can't imagine they ever thought they were making anything other than a really good, groundbreaking thriller, so they didn't pull any punches. There's so many places they could have played it safe—and Buffalo Bill is the prime example, but the general level of bloodcurdling yuckiness is another—but they didn't. And it was so freeing. Philadelphia was an Oscar Contender™ from the get-go, so I can just imagine the studio meetings where they discussed how much gay was too much—at least they got to slow-dance.

Nathaniel: I'm so glad that Demme got his groove back with Rachel Getting Married. So so glad. But back to Buffalo Bill and his basket. I've never been that angry about his deviant sexuality either since the film points out that he's not a true transsexual. Plus, the movie's sexuality is ambiguous enough and frankly so all over the place as to give anyone of any persuasion something to chew on: It's easy to read Clarice as a lesbian (and not just because Jodie is playing her) and there's plenty of sexual politicking of the heternormative variety as well. And that great moment when Hannibal snarks "People will say we're in love" after Clarice, having betrayed him, comes back with her tail between her legs has always struck me as less lecherous-old-man flirtation and more frenemy bitchy. I'd say the movie's sexual slipperiness is a strength rather than an indefensible weakness. At the very least it sets the movie apart.

I agree that the film offers up plenty of humanity in unexpected places, given the genre it's housed in and the overall gothic flamboyance. I adore the casting of Brooke Smith as 'the Girl in the Pit' (née Catherine Martin) who strikes me as almost shockingly recognizably human whenever she's in a movie. She works wonders here as something like a less sparkly version of Jodie Foster/Clarice Starling herself, resourceful and goodhearted if not infallible and scared shitless in very specific ways rather than as a generic victim. I absolutely love that moment when she turns on her rescuer ("DON'T LEAVE ME HERE YOU FUCKING BITCH!!!") and I love that her voice operates on an even lower register than Jodie's. They aren't girlie girls... even if the men around them want to reduce them to sexual objects and body parts.

In ways both recognizably human and others.

Mike: Speaking of recognizably human, my favorite thing about Going My Way was how three-dimensional and human everyone was. Especially the revelation that in Father Bing's fun-loving past he and the opera singer were in a cross-dressing revue together. A night of passion, a savage murder, and Bing ran, Quasimodo-style in a feather boa and purple lipstick, into the seminary. [muted conversation] Sorry, different movie.

I'm trying to find a way to explain why, exactly, I feel so fond of Going My Way, which lacks drama or comedy, or even much of a plot. It's smug and self-satisfied a lot of the time, and Bing's Oscar-winning performance consists of some active eyebrows and little else. But I give it points for being sort of daring, at least for the movie it is. It admits that things like prostitution exist—there's a pretty amazing raised Bing-brow at the piano with Jean Heather that speaks volumes. It gives Father Bing a somewhat sordid past (an entertainer!), and I love the opera singer Genevieve's face when she sees Bing's collar: there's a whole story there that doesn't need to be put into words, and there's something like regret in Bing's face when he's watching her sing Carmen (which it spends an inordinate amount of time on). What might have been, I suppose, although whether it's his feelings for her or for the music, I can't say. It has an Asian kid and a black kid who aren't caricatures. It has two genuine, truly moving moments: when we see Ted Junior in his uniform for the first time, and when Father Fitzgibbon and his mom embrace.

But I admit that I'm scrambling to find specifics, and for the most part its best quality is an innocuous goodwill that doesn't come close to making it Best Picture-worthy.

Nathaniel: I had a big ol' lump in my throat at the big mama reunion, too. I could see it coming an hour away but I'm not made of stone!

I never give movies much credit for tearjerking, though, because that's just a natural byproduct of plot elements. Heartstrings can be plucked in even the most inept of movies: sick pets, lost loves reunited, death, deathbed farewells, miracle cures and family reunions (what we have here) will do the trick every time. But frankly, even if we're just sticking to mechanics of plot, which the film encourages by being so damn mechanical, it's kind of a mess. By the time the act of God arrived I was shaking my fist at the heavens: "Why must you make me watch a whole new ACT of this movie? It should be ending now!" And can we talk about the weird pacing? Didn't it feel like it was a one-take movie given the dead space bookending each scene, like they just filmed a stage show with botched entrances and forgotten cues?

There was so much dead space that I was mostly content to dream about other movies while watching it. Speaking of... the unspoken backstory between Father Chuck O'Malley and Genevieve clearly involves a bastard lovechild named Mary Poppins. She's just like her father, gliding right into malfunctioning households, singing her way into everyone's hearts, whipping children into shape and loosening up the stick in the mud Father before her own hasty departure with a beeline to an improbable lead acting Oscar win.

Nick: I was feeling so ready to be neutral and comparatively unchurlish about Going My Way, and then you had to mention Mary Poppins. Cuz that's a movie, dog nabbit.

But I shall soldier on and admit that I think what finally pulls Going My Way juuust barely across the line for me is actually all that dead space. I get tired of all those Doubt-type movies that try to evoke the atmosphere of the local church with cold wind blowing across the steeples, and freezing pavements, and crows perching on the pointy gates. I like that Going My Way's church is quiet but not solemn. I completely agree that this is sometimes dramatically enervating, and the VISUAL dead space kills me at many, many moments. There just isn't anything going on in these shots, and all the slow shuffling around and the ambulatory excuse for a sorta-kinda-scenario, much less a plot, can get to be too, too much. But there's a kind of doggedness to the film's determination to be easy and casual that I wind up sort of admiring. And I do like the saucy way Jean Heather reports on Bing's second visit that she's been filling her hours while living on Ted's dime by learning to put some emotion into her songs. I'll say!

So, this is how Going My Way tricks me into finding it sort of pleasant, at least to think back on if not to re-experience. But if ever there were a movie that's just CRUSHED by the weight of having been a Best Picture winner, it's gotta be this one. It's just the wrong kind of prize for such a forthrightly pedestrian, featherweight, and undistinguished piece of work, which for better or worse isn't even straining for the seriousness or the cachet of an Emile Zola.

Nathaniel: No, but Emile Zola didn't have pipes like Bing Crosby. Play to your strengths!

Nick: But surely Emile had a mama. Why couldn't he have hugged her at the end? Surely all those honies with the sea-cucumber headdresses in Great Ziegfeld had mamas, and some of them were probably long-lost, too. SO much potential hugging. Will Munny could have shot his mama, point-blank. Forrest Gump... oh, wait. Never mind. If all Best Pictures ended this way, then Going My Way winning Best Picture would make the teensiest bit of sense.

Nathaniel: In lieu of an actual embrace, Hannibal Lecter will just call to say he loves you. He'll just call to say how much he cares. "Dr. Lecter. Dr. Lecter. Dr. Lecter. Dr. Lecter."

Oops, I just dropped Going My Way "like a hot potato."

But one more note: I really love Bing Crosby's voice. I find it so smooth and deep and comforting and I suspect that's a large part of My Way's appeal. Well, the comforting part. It's definitely not smooth or deep. The whole thing is like a big warm quilt of goodheartedness and God and traditional values that you're supposed to wrap around yourself to shield you from the changing times (things we're getting cah-razy in the mid 40s) and the unruly younger generation! "Kids these days" You can even see this clearly in the way Father O'Malley openly mocks the loosey-goosey performance style of whore-in-training Carol. And he's usually such a nice guy.

Mike: Not to mention the "barfola" music (OK, it's "boffola," but it sure did sound like he was saying "barfola.") the two young, hip priests were making fun of—although it sounded a heck of a lot more fun than the mawkish theme song! Meanwhile, over at Buffalo Bill's house, "Hip Priest" by The Fall is blaring on the soundtrack while Bill stalks Starling through his chamber of horrors.

Nick: Somehow, Bill manages to star in a Jonathan Demme movie and not listen to a damn thing that sounds like samba, Latin jazz, or world music. Nor does Lecter. I guess that's what being a psychopath gets you. At least on the musical-score front, I do think Howard Shore was as much of an unsung hero of Lambs as Fujimoto was. Such fabulous brooding in those dark, simple melodies, which punch up lots of scenes without dominating the whole movie.

We've obviously made a lot of hay out of the stark dissimilarity of these movies, but in a way, that's interesting: we're catching Oscar at his most airily escapist and at his most uncharacteristically morbid. I agree with Nathaniel about some of the bases for the McCarey movie's appeal in 1944, but then again, nothing ever changes. The same voters who nominated Going My Way nominated Double Indemnity, and the same sickos who threw all of Oscar's most prestigious trophies at Silence of the Lambs also got it together to finally nominate a Disney feature. And 1991-92 wasn't the most happy-go-lucky hour in American life, either. If Beauty and the Beast had won, we might think all the AMPAS voters wanted to escape from the war in the Middle East and the sharp economic downturn. (Speaking of how nothing ever changes...) Sometimes the truth about Oscar really is that there's no truth at all: voters like what they like, when they like it. Whatever sense we try to make of it later, they go their own way.

What about you, dear readers? Can you stomach Anthony Hopkins's performance? Does Bing sing for you? Are you buffaloed by all the Oscars these films won? Let us know in the comments section! (Perhaps even in this comments section, so we can keep the conversation in one place!)

Top Ten Rentals & Revival House Viewings, 2009

10. It Started with Eve (1941). My indefensible infatuation with Deanna Durbin, who started out incredibly cute and became incredibly beautiful, and who could sing like an angel but didn't have the pathos of Judy Garland, launched into the stratosphere after seeing this mid-career blossoming-into-adulthood romp. Why did she have to retire in favor of domesticity? I wish she had watched my #1 film before she made that decision.

9. Eyes without a Face (France, 1960). It's so restrained and polite, this film about a mad doctor who murders in order to save the disfigured daughter who hates him. Despite the carnival music, the cold destruction of life and thoughtful disposal of bodies, it's a film of still, composed, frightful images. That mask pops up in some of my nightmares.

8. The Fountainhead (1949). I completely reject this film's politics, which holds that it's OK for a guy to destroy something built from millions of dollars of public money if he's pissed that someone messed with his design, but King Vidor makes Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal into gods, and I'm pleased that author/screenwriter Ayn Rand created a screenplay that's the best-ever rebuttal to her own philosophy.

7. Scrooge (UK, 1951). Victorian England was a scary, dirty place for most people, and this film, unlike so many postcard-pretty adaptations of what is essentially a horror story, drives that home with gusto. Alastair Sim is the best Scrooge ever, and this is the best Christmas movie ever.

6. The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (Czechoslovakia, 1965). It made me think of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days: cold, realist pictures of struggling against a faceless, inhuman bureaucracy in order to find medical treatment. Zbynek Brynych's film documents a Kafkaesque Czechoslovakia that masquerades as a film about Nazis, but oppression, backstabbing, and inhumanity are universal.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Indirectly, Max Ophuls's practice run for his French film The Earrings of Madame de... helped me understand him, and that other masterpiece, better. It also allowed me to really appreciate Joan Fontaine's typical little-girl-grows-up performance when it's used in the right film.

4. I Know Where I'm Going! (1945). A simple, black and white film—deceptively simple, for Powell and Pressburger, the masters of operatic narratives, bring their flawless ear for dialog and eye for compositions to what's essentially a romantic comedy, not elevating it (because that assumes that romantic comedies are lesser beings) but showing us how it's done.

3. The Devils (1971). Ye gods, this is a disturbing, frightening, psychedelic nightmare of a movie. Ken Russell jumped way up on my "see more of this person's films" list (Tommy didn't really endear him to me).

2. Shame (Sweden, 1968). Bergman could say more in 90 minutes than most directors can manage in three-plus hours. Here, he's looking at war, loyalty, jealousy, hopelessness; Liv Ulmann and Max von Sydow are commitment and fear of commitment; Sven Nyquist makes that 1.66:1 frame scream with beauty and desolation; and how can I even start to explain how great this film is?

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (France, 1975). It's hard to describe it without sounding like the punch line of a joke about "art films," but Chantal Akerman's masterpiece about modern domesticity spends three breathless, enrapturing hours watching Delphine Seyrig keep house and entertain johns, making a forceful feminist statement by just showing, never telling. The Criterion Collection finally released it on DVD, but do yourself the favor of watching it on the biggest screen you can find.

Runners-up: The Children Are Watching Us (Italy, 1944); Grave of the Fireflies (Japan, 1988); Lucrece Borgia (France, 1935); Mamma Roma (Italy, 1962); Moonrise (1948); The Motorcycle Diaries (2004); Taipei Story (Taiwan, 1985); The Tall T (1957); Two Women (Italy, 1960).

Done for the Decade

I finished off 2009 with five more reviews in three days.

Big Fan, Wrestler scribe Robert Siegel's directorial debut, is a heck of a lot better than that decent but overpraised film.

Deadline stars Thora Birch and the late Brittany Murphy. It's not very good at all.

Avatar looks great despite the big blue Gumbys, but it's basically Dances with Wolves on Mars. And 3D delivery technology has a long way to go.

Bootleg Film is a quirky post-Tarantino crime comedy, but that description doesn't come within a country mile of doing it justice.

Town Without Pity is almost good, and Kirk Douglas is definitely good in it.

Dreams in the Witch-House might be the best H.P. Lovecraft adaptation ever.

Apocalypse, Incest, Murder, Bigamy, Christmas: A Week Chez Goatdog

9 looks great; I only wish the screenplay had been as good as the animation.

Precious is earth-shattering; I only wish the direction had been as good as the performances.

The Screwfly Solution is nothing to write home about, but someone needs to make a movie about the lady who wrote it.

The Bigamist is a surprisingly open-minded film given its release date; I only wish Ida Lupino hadn't waited more than a decade before she directed again.

And Scrooge is the best Christmas movie ever made. Or close to it.

A Certain Bank-Owned Cinema III: Return of a Certain Bank-Owned Cinema

Many of you know that I run the Bank of America Cinema, a revival house hidden inside a bank building on Chicago's northwest side. Now the rest of you know that too. Here's our schedule for the January-June 2010 season:

1/2: Pandora's Box (1929, G.W. Pabst) 35mm -- With live electronic theatre organ accompaniment by Jay Warren!

1/9: My Sister Eileen (1955, Richard Quine) 35mm

1/16: The First Legion (1951, Douglas Sirk) 16mm -- not on DVD

1/23: Hellzapoppin' (1941, H.C. Potter) 16mm -- not on DVD

1/30: Amnesiac Noir Double Feature:
My Name Is Julia Ross (1945, Joseph H. Lewis) 35mm
Two O'Clock Courage (1945, Anthony Mann) 16mm -- not on DVD

2/6: Imitation of Life (1934, John M. Stahl) 16mm

2/13: History Is Made at Night (1937, Frank Borzage) 16mm

2/20: Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Charles Chaplin) 35mm

2/27: The Visit (1964, Bernhard Wicki) 16mm CinemaScope! -- not on DVD

3/6: The Deep Blue Sea (1955, Anatole Litvak) 16mm Technicolor CinemaScope! -- not on DVD

3/13: Dragonwyck (1946, Joseph M. Mankiewicz) 35mm

3/20: God's Little Acre (1958, Anthony Mann) 35mm -- not on DVD

3/27: Dead of Night (1945, various) 16mm

4/3: The Big Broadcast (1932, Frank Tuttle) 16mm -- not on DVD

4/10: Radio Days (1987, Woody Allen) 35mm

4/17: The Mark of Zorro (1940, Rouben Mamoulian) 35mm

4/24: I'm No Angel (1933, Wesley Ruggles) 16mm

5/1: A Canterbury Tale (1944, Powell & Pressburger) 35mm

5/8: Ladies in Retirement (1941, Charles Vidor) 35mm -- not on DVD

5/15: Lifeboat (1944, Alfred Hitchcock) 35mm

5/22: Mr. Wu (1927, William Nigh) 35mm -- with live electronic theatre organ accompaniment by Jay Warren! not on DVD

5/29: Brute Force (1947, Jules Dassin) 16mm

6/5: Decision at Sundown (1957, Budd Boetticher) 35mm

6/12: For Me and My Gal (1942, Busby Berkeley) 16mm

6/19: The Enchanted Cottage (1945, John Cromwell) 16mm -- not on DVD

6/26: The Outlaw (1943, Howard Hughes) 35mm

Films start at 8:00 pm on Saturday nights at 4901 W. Irving Park Rd., Chicago, IL 60641. Entrance is in the back. Admission is $5 or $3 if you're over 55 or under 10. Popcorn is a buck, parking is free.

Ten to Go

Having reviewed A Serious Man (I hated it) and Food, Inc. (I merely disliked it), I have ten reviews or articles to write by the end of the year in order to retain my membership in the Online Film Critics Society.

I'll have some positive reviews soon, I promise! I really enjoyed the animated film 9 and the surprisingly great Big Fan, so it's not all gloom and doom around here. Plus, there should be another Best Pictures from the Outside In episode going public soon... right?

What is the meaning of these uniformed men?

If you think all I've been doing is touring Rome, you're right! But during a layover at Dulles Airport, I managed to knock out another review, this one of the first film in the Lone Wolf and Cub series of samurai films. It was pretty darned good, and I hope to watch the others. Read about it.

Fox, Box, Truck

I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox! I did not love The Box or Trucker!

Parking Is But One Benefit; or, the Future of a Revival House

The other Michael Phillips in town wrote an article about this weekend's show at the Bank of America Cinema, for which I program and project. The movie is the trippy Dr. Seuss musical The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, and the parking lot is, indeed, large and free. (But it wasn't the only thing we talked about.)

After that appeared on his blog, word came down from the top that I can program another six-month calendar, so we'll have movies at least until June 2010. After that, who knows. You can possibly affect the future by coming out to the movies and bringing your friends.

Here's the rest of this year's schedule:

November 14 - The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953, Roy Rowland)
November 21 - The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1946, Preston Sturges)
November 28 - Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
December 5 - Rose-Marie: Indian Love Call (1936, W.S. Van Dyke)
December 12 - Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey)
December 19 - Scrooge (1951, Brian Desmond Hurst)

Lovers and Fathers and Baby Seals

Recent reviews over at the homefront:

Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experiment... I mean, Experience, is all shiny surface, and it works until it tries to dig a little deeper.

Bobcat Goldthwaite's World's Greatest Dad is so agonizingly funny and uncomfortable that I started to feel as if I had done something wrong and was about to be punished.

The Norwegian kids' movie SOS: Summer of Suspense features great kid actors, a screenplay that doesn't talk down to kids or stuff in inappropriate innuendo for adults, and a really cute baby seal.

Peter Handke on John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln

From Peter Handke's marvelous 1972 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell:

[A mob is attempting to lynch two brothers accused of murder] ...Lincoln stopped them by softly reminding them of themselves, of what they were, what they could be, and what they had forgotten. This scene—Lincoln on the wooden steps of the jailhouse, with his hand on the mob's battering ram—embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only the drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever. All around me in the theater I felt the audience breathing and coming to life again.

I wish I had written such a simple, poetic explanation of what John Ford's little masterpiece achieves. I find myself thinking about it a lot: about Fonda's muted performance that's not really Lincoln but the idea of Lincoln; about Ford's affinity for small towns, warts and all; and about that enigmatic final scene, after which the audience does, indeed, seem to come to life again, released from the film's spell.

Marlene; or, Marlene Dietrich Refuses to Be in Marlene

How do you make a documentary with the participation of someone who doesn't want to participate, who refuses to answer questions or even think about them, who won't help you examine her life—who thinks that the very idea of a documentary about her is idiotic? Faced with such questions, famed German actor-turned-documentarian Maximilian Schell answered them: his Marlene, about reclusive star Marlene Dietrich, is how you make a documentary about someone who refuses to participate. This fascinating, sometimes enraging film is mostly about the impossibility of making it, and through this paradox I think we learn much more about Dietrich than we would have if she had submitted to the usual paint-by-numbers, fawning Biography Channel type of film.

Her contract, which we can imagine her waving constantly, stipulated that she won't appear on camera, so we never see her as she was in 1983 when the documentary was filmed, although late in the film we see her hands as she holds family photos and refuses to discuss them—"Why should anyone be interested in where they were born?" Her voice is pretty much as we rememeber it from her later films, such as Judgment at Nuremberg and Touch of Evil. She hasn't watched any of her films since she created them; she disputes that she was any good in them anyway. "Do you think I'd sit in some stuffy old cinema and watch an old film? I read books!"

Still, we get illuminating glimpses of her real feelings about the people she worked with: Fritz Lang was a terrible director and an autocrat, she loved Spencer Tracy enough to tear up at the mention of his name, we should all cross ourselves before speaking the holy name of Orson Welles, she thinks Emil Jannings was a horrible ham, and she dismisses improvisation as "amateurish" and the Method as nonsense. And we get some of her personal feelings about other things: women's lib is a mistaken psychosis, because women's brains weigh less than men's—perhaps a surprising belief from the bisexual woman who dressed like a man in Morocco, but part of this doc's point is that the screen woman and the real woman have little to do with each other.

Although she steadfastly refuses to rewatch or discuss her old movies, it's fascinating that her second career as a cabaret singer was built on songs from those movies she dismisses as junk. Late in the documentary, after Schell finally browbeats her into watching some of her early performances on video in her apartment, she becomes increasingly combative and bitchy when he asks her to comment on them. And although she's said a dozen times that she thinks they're "kitsch", she switches gears, arguing that it's like asking someone to look at the Sistine Chapel and then offer observations—"Who the hell am I to comment?" It's a tantalizing crack in her armor, and it casts her entire performance in this documentary about her life into a new perspective. Because it is a performance.

How much of her previous refusal to talk about her films as art or herself as an artist was an act? Buried approximately halfway through the film's running time is what I think is the real answer behind her refusal to really participate. Finally, after decades in which her every move was documented by tell-all magazine articles, gossip columns, and newsreels, she has the power to decide what's public and what's private. Now Maximilian Schell, and behind him the public who's still interested in the Marlene Dietrich they remember from the screen and stage, is demanding that she cede some of her control. She frustrates him to the point that he stalks out of the room, and she makes him pay for it when he comes back, calling him an ill-mannered lout who should return to his momma for lessons in manners. "You have a masochistic complex, dear," she cackles, but we already know that—he stuck around to finish his film, despite her best efforts to drive him away. We should all be grateful that he did.

This post is part of Joe Valdez's Class of 1984 Blogathon. Make sure to check in there for the rest of the entries, all of which were released when I was nine years old and already an established film critic, at least in my living room. I'm posting early because it's past my bedtime.

If They Only Had Texting: Three Films

Three films whose endings would have been radically different had text-messaging existed.

It Happened One Night
From: Ellie
To: Peter
Message: help they takin me i luv u

Any version of Romeo and Juliet
From: Juliet
To: Romeo
Message: im not rly dead

Jaws
From: Brody
To: US Naval Base, Newport, RI
Message: pls send submarine

The Real Joan of Arc

Over the next few months, I'm going to be watching and reviewing films about Joan of Arc. The first is a Franco-German TV documentary that attempts to poke holes in one of the most famous, and perhaps most misunderstood, legends of Western civilization. It's a TV documentary, so it's not great cinema, but fans of the topic should definitely give it a look. Read about it.

The Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Downey Jr. of the Aughts

The opening narration of the excellent zom-com Zombieland is delivered in a slightly nasal, high-pitched, nervous, yet appealing voice obviously belonging to someone in his early twenties. I thought it was Michael Cera, despite the fact that I probably knew that it was Jesse Eisenberg. I'm not entirely sure it made a difference to the film. But it made me think: here is a pair that was destined to make buddy comedies together. Need a geeky, nervous, skinny kid? Attention shoppers, we have them in blond or brunette, wavy or curly hair. They come with matched shy-guy slouches and earnest face-forward postures, and both look great in a hoodie. They're both really good at a certain kind of character, and I'm afraid they're both due for approximately a decade of unhappiness as they outgrow that character but have yet to grow into mature, adult parts.

Carmen Jones Stinks

And Otto Preminger is a terrible director. Read about it.

Destry Rides into a Genre-Shaped Hole

Destry Rides Again could have been the best Western of all time, until it caved in to genre and period requirements, but it's an amazingly fun ride until the climax. Read about my sadness.

Everything Is Glourious, Except the Basterds

I love pretty much everything about Quentin Tarantino's latest film except the title characters and their storyline. That's a good third of the film, but the rest is so stupendous that it doesn't come close to ruining the film. Read about it.

I Saw Avatar

's teaser trailer the other day. (See what I did there?) My first thought was that it looked... sorta terrible. Silly. Crayola. After ten years of planning and work, and a $190 million budget plus however much the ad campaign is costing, this is what James Cameron came up with? This is what he wanted this film to look like? Are you out of your stinking mind? The effects look like they date from Final Fantasy, and not even the 2001 film full of dead-eyed zombies—I'm talking about late-1990s installments of the video game. And even if that's just the work-in-progress, not-quite-finished look, and they'll look less cheap in the finished film, the character design is downright laughable.

I'm not judging the finished product; I'm just talking about how utterly, laughably bad the teaser makes the film look. Maybe the film will be good, or great, and I'll be happy to say so, if indeed it is. (At least, as soon as my 3D headache goes away.)

See for yourself.

Go to Hell Bastards!

That's the subtitle; the title is Detective Bureau 2-3. Local treasure Tim Brayton and I discuss it over at his blog, in the second installment of our series on maverick Japanese director Seijun Suzuki. Suzuki made light-years of progress in the five years since the previous film we covered, Underworld Beauty. Surry down to Antagony and Ecstasy for our conversation.

Funny People Works, Sort Of

It's two and a half hours long, which is far too long for a comedy (and for most movies), but what works in it works well: the aggravated friendship between a dying comedian (Adam Sandler) and his protege/whipping boy (Seth Rogen). Read about it.

Twenty Actors

My twenty favorite actors, unranked, except for the top two. Where possible, I used images from my favorite performances.

Check out Nathaniel's list, and his links to other lists.

The Films of Seijun Suzuki: Underworld Beauty (1958)

In this new blog series, Tim Brayton of Antagony and Ecstasy and yours truly, Mike Phillips, will be looking at the films of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki, who's acknowledged, at least by those who have heard of him, as one of the masters of yakuza cinema, contemporary Japanese cinema, and cinema that you might need to watch more than once to completely understand. We'll be looking at ten of his films from various points in his 50-year career; we're skipping some of the more well-known ones such as Tokyo Drifter, which Tim covered elsewhere, and Branded to Kill, and we're limited to the films that are available on DVD.

We're starting the series with Underworld Beauty (1958), the first of the string of increasingly bizarre yakuza films that made him famous. Their strangeness and constant deviation from the Nikkatsu studio formula led to his discharge after he directed his masterpiece, 1967's Branded to Kill. He sued, won, was blacklisted, and made films only intermittently for the next decade. He had a career renaissance in the early 1980s starting with his Japanese Academy Award-winning film Zigeunerweisen, and another 20 years later with 2001's Pistol Opera and 2005's Princess Raccoon. Now 86 and still directing, he recently completed his 54th feature, A Goldfish of the Flame, which appears to be an erotic, adult take on the story that inspired Hiyao Miyazaki's most recent film, Ponyo. If there's anyone qualified to make a gonzo film about sex with goldfish, it's Seijun Suzuki.

But on to Underworld Beauty, which is in many ways a pretty straightforward yakuza film. A gangster, Miyamoto (Michitaro Mizushima), is released from prison, retrieves the diamonds that were the object of the botched robbery that landed him there, and attempts to make amends to a friend who lost his leg in the same robbery by selling the jewels and giving him the proceeds. Things, as you might have guessed, don't work out quite so smoothly.

I was most impressed by how the film used the stolen diamonds, which prompt a symphony of greed, disloyalty, and murder, as more than just a MacGuffin. They become identified with both Miyamoto and Akiko, the reckless younger sister of his crippled friend (and likely the "underworld beauty" of the title). Like diamonds, their relationship is forged through heat and pressure, and the most dazzling shootouts occur in a steam bath and in a coal-filled boiler room. This strikes me as more thematic cohesiveness than you'd get in a routine crime film, although I can't claim to be an expert on them and I might be mistaken attributing that to any Suzuki authorial "stamp." But the Suzuki extravagance is certainly here, apparent in the fixation on half-naked female bodies (many of them mannequins) and operatic scenes of violence (my favorite was Miyamoto's destruction of Arita's mannequin studio).

Tim: I should probably make it clear to everyone before we get to far that I haven't dug too deeply into Suzuki's filmography myself; in fact, Underworld Beauty is only the second one of his films that I've ever seen (though I have been an admirer of the Criterion Collection covers for his movies since time immemorial). So thanks, Mike, for putting this idea out there in the first place. It's a learning experience for me as much as anything.

So, on to the movie: I completely agree with you, that the use of the diamonds in the film is unusually clever for a plot-driving device. I was particularly taken with the very late shot of the diamonds lying on a pile of coal, shining in the fire light. It really tied up in a neat bow the theme of diamonds (our heroes) being created through great pressure from filthy, common coal—and at the same time, it stresses how at heart, the diamonds haven't ultimately changed: they're still just lying around in a coal bin, getting filthy. I was expecting that to be the final shot of the movie, in fact, and I was a touch let down when the final scene faded up. It felt like a studio-mandated pat conclusion, but maybe I'm reading things into it that aren't there.

I might also add, the diamonds are a metaphor for Underworld Beauty itself: take a perfectly common substance (the yakuza picture), apply pressure (Suzuki's artistry), and what comes out is far more beautiful than it ought to be. I'll admit to having seen very few 1950s Japanese crime movies directed by someone not named Kurosawa, but there was a level of artistry here, a certain command of the frame and the camera, that I for one don't tend to expect from B-films. The scene where Akiko is posing for the nude study, for example: the way that Suzuki choreorgraphs the actress's movements with the camera,and even the exact locations of the cuts are all perfectly placed to tease the audience as mercilessly as possible. It's great technical filmmaking, even if it's ultimately in service to a bawdy joke.

I'll admit, what jumped out at me most was the sex in the movie, but I know that we'll have plenty of opportunities to talk about sex and nudity in this and every other Suzuki film, so instead of going there now, my second observation about it: this seemed, to me, an unexpectedly American movie, especially the lighting and the musical score, which could have both been taken intact from the early noir period. Change the character names, and this could easily pass for a Hollywood crime drama of the same decade. Part of Suzuki's craziness, or was this a tendency in Japanese genre films at the time that I'm just not aware of?

Mike: I think you're probably right about the studio-mandated happy ending—it should have ended with the diamonds getting lost in the coal pile, to be eventually fed into the boiler and destroyed (if diamonds do, indeed, burn), which would have put this ending on par with the gold blowing away in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What little I've read about Nikkatsu's policies indicates that Suzuki probably had control over how to shoot things, but not what scenes to shoot. The studio assigned directors to projects at random, and I'm guessing they mandated other things too.

Re: Sex. Since the next film we're covering is called Young Breasts, I join you in abstaining from that conversation here. But it's interesting to note that post-Suzuki, Nikkatsu was pretty much relegated to making softcore porn films for a number of years before recovering enough to branch back out into other genres.

And I'm totally with you on the similarities with American films. I don't have much to base this opinion on because I know next to nothing about pre-Suzuki Japanese crime films, but I have to believe that at least some of this is intentional. Although with some, the sheer iconographic hegemony of the putative "source" film might be misleading me: can any movie have a chase through a sewer tunnel without reminding me of The Third Man? But other sequences seemed like deliberate homages, including the alley chase where we only see shadows (shades of Panic in the Streets). One thing that bothered me about the noirish shot setups was that the lurching camera, which often had to maneuver into the right position to nail that gorgeous or ironic shot, took on its own personality, as if the cameraman was part of the scene and had to step out of the way of the action. It drew too much attention to the camera work, to the detriment of the effect the shot might have had without the visible maneuvering. It may be that this early in Suzuki's career he was still working out the kinks (pun intended) of his style.

Tim: Yeah, I noticed the same wobbly camera moves that you did. I have to be honest, part of me found them charming; they add to the hand-made DIY quality of the whole work. Though I'll agree that they detract from the effectiveness of those individual shots.

And I absolutely must concede your greater point, which is that Underworld Beauty finds Suzuki trying and not always succeeding to nail down his style. I think the fact that we both saw so much American film noir influence speaks to the fact that he wasn't being so creative here as he'd be later on, not that I'm any kind of expert on late Suzuki. But the last thing you could say about Tokyo Drifter is that it's beholden to any kind of pre-existing tradition, except imaybe that it cuts together any number of disparate elements from other movies. Whereas Underworld Beauty, though it certainly has flashes of craziness (mostly in the scenes of violence), seems a great deal more tentative. It's worth pointing out that if Wikipedia is to be believed, this was the first film in which the man born "Seitaro" Suzuki was credited by his nom du film, Seijun Suzuki. Almost as though, after knocking out a few standard-template pictures for Nikkatsu, he wanted to reinvent himself and his aesthetic, but it took him some practice before he really figured out how to make a "Seijun Suzuki film."

But I don't want to lose sight of the movie we have, in all its proto-Suzuki goodness. For starters, we haven't even mentioned the two leads, Michitaro Mitzushima as Miyamoto, and Mari Shiraki as Akiko, who I think both did a really fantastic job. Mitzushima is great especially, doing a sort of parody of the American gangster trope. Being unaccustomed to the "lower-tier" of Japanese actors in the '50s—the ones who didn't get to work with Kurosawa and Ozu, basically—I wasn't prepared for Mitzushima's take on the material, which is so... flinty? hard-boiled? It calls out for clichés like that, because it's a performance so knowing about the clichés in the character.

I think it's actually with the characters and the performances that the film really seems most like what I associate with Suzuki's films, more than the occasional bursts of highly-choreographed violence (which you mentioned before, and I'd love to hear you elaborate on your thoughts there). In a typical American crime film that's striving for some kind of artistic merit, we usually see characters given extra amounts of characterization, so that they seem like real people grounding this outrageous story. The characters in Underworld Beauty seem almost to be the exact opposite—though they're given plenty of details establishing who they are, they always feel extremely fake, like they're narrative elements in the shape of people, and they're aware of it.

Mike: I did like Mitzushima's deadpan squint as Miyamoto, and I absolutely loved the fact that he always had that black hat cocked over his eye. But Shiraki's character made absolutely no sense; it wasn't the actress's fault, as the screenplay jerked her around so you couldn't guess her motivations from one scene to the next, but Shiraki didn't do anything interesting to salvage it for me. The nonsensical character goes with the film's B-movie origins, but I'm blaming Shiraki for not finding anything interesting in the character. The supporting characters tended to blend into the background as toughs in trenchcoats, but that's to be expected—how many American noirs developed their supporting characters with more than a trait or two? Two stood out, one in a good way, one in a bad way. Arita, the diamond thief and "artist," was positively frightening, veering wildly between deadly cold when he retrieves the diamonds from his associate's abdomen and almost Renfield-like squeaking when he finally has one in his mitts; but the strutting, cowardly toady whose name I didn't catch seems to be a staple comic-relief character in these films, and I could do without him. It makes you wonder why a gang boss would have such a preening buffoon around, but I suppose they're like court jesters (with guns).

The Perverse Suzuki Violence(TM) that struck me the most was Miyamoto's recovering of the diamonds in Arita's shop; surrounded by half-finished nude mannequins, Miyamoto bitch-slaps Arita into a moaning wreck crawling on the floor amid detached heads. It's so damned operatic, with its carefully choreographed movements around the studio, like you'd get in a classic Hollywood dance scene, only with nude mannequins instead of backup dancers. It's pretty short, nothing like the extended shootout that closes the film, but it's a good preview of the weird sex-and-violence concoction we'll get with later Suzuki films. And I can't say for sure, but I'd guess either Suzuki or someone else at Nikkatsu had seen Stanley Kubrick's early film Killer's Kiss, with its finale inside the mannequin factory; at least the mannequins in Suzuki's film make sense.

But again I'm making connections I'm not sure it's OK to make. I read that he hadn't even heard of, say, John Huston before he started directing, and that his brother stated that he stopped being influenced by anything beyond his early twenties (which would have been in during WW2), so is it safe to say he was taking notes during Kubrick's more forgettable films? I feel like a bit of a fake proclaiming this film's stylistic and thematic ancestors, but given the lack of information on Suzuki, I guess we'll have to take that risk, at least until we get to his better-known films.

Tim: I must confess that I've never quite gotten around to Killer's Kiss. But whether it influenced Suzuki or not—my gut says "probably not"—that mannequin sequence was a real marvelous bit of filmmaking, and no mistake. You compare it to a dance sequence, which is probably the best way to describe it.

More than just the bravura style on display, though, what really got to me was the strange erotic charge of it. I was idly reminded of something I once read, that in Japanese porn for a long time (maybe still?) there are very strict limits on what parts of the human body you can show on camera, so the filmmakers have to be creative in their visual metaphors—hence things like the evergreen "tentacle rape" subgenre. Decades earlier, there was of course no Japanese porn industry to speak of, but I was struck the same way: all those bare mannequins stood in for the more explicit nudity that Suzuki plainly wanted to show (that nude modeling scene!) but couldn't. So instead he went crazy with what he could put in the movie, and it gives the whole thing a peculiar sense of being absolutely sexual without any real sex to speak of. Sort of like how, when you're watching, e.g., a Ginger Rogers dance and she spins so fast her dress reveals a great deal of thigh, and it feels so much naughtier than an actress going full frontal in the 1970s: it so palpably oughtn't be there, in that time, that even the tiny hint of the human female form seems outrageously kinky.

Ah! but we weren't going to talk about sex yet. And with the next film on the docket titled Young Breasts, I suspect we're going to have a great deal of sex to discuss in the very immediate future. So let us her leave the young Suzuki, still trying to figure out exactly who he was as a filmmaker, and move on to... well, still young Suzuki, but at least a young Suzuki who was out and proud about making sexploitation.

500 Days of Summer Isn't Very Good

To begin, I refuse to put those silly parentheses in the title. There's no logical reason for them; they're just a cutesy affectation. Like so much in this film, actually, that maybe I should concede to the filmmakers' wishes and include them, but there's far too much affectation going on in 500 Days of Summer for my taste already. Somewhere in there is the story of a decent guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who incorrectly believes that when his internal sensors target a woman as "the one," her internal sensors should do the same for her.

Read the rest.

Films That Are Entering My Top 100 List

Because it's so much fun to mess with Nick, who may be the only person waiting in breathless anticipation for me to post the thing, here are seven films that are new to my new top 100 list. But what rank do they have? I'm not telling.

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Heaven Can Wait (1943)
Seventh Heaven (1927)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
War and Peace (USSR, 1968)
The Conformist (Italy, 1970)
The Piano (1993)

Films That Are Leaving My Top 100 List

#32 Almost Famous (2000)
#47 Y Tu Mama Tambien (2002)
#55 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
#84 Lost in Translation (2003)
#85 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
#95 The Pianist (2002)
#99 Ghost World (2001)

"But why?" you ask. Because I'm eliminating anything released within the last decade. These are only minor changes in the grand scheme of things; the rest of my top 100 list is going to look radically different. Dozens of reappraisals, new discoveries, and films I plumb forgot the first time around will make their appearances when I post the darned thing, probably next month. Stay tuned.

Black Monks of Mississippi at Shine King

Chicago artist (and my friend) Theaster Gates with his musical group, the Black Monks of Mississippi, at a west side shoeshine stand. This is from footage my friend Aaron and I shot for my in-production documentary about Theaster, his art, and his music.

Watch it. It's only 4 minutes long.

Francis Ford Coppola is back.

The godfather of the 1970s deals with a different kind of family (which resembles his own) in this weird, wonderful, sometimes hilarious story about fathers, brothers, and brilliance. Read about it.

A Couple of Fallen Women

Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman reminds us that "melodrama" isn't a bad word, and that "tearjerkers" and "chick flicks" and "women's pictures" can be great art. And that I'm not such a cynic that I don't get misty-eyed at the movies once in a while. Read about it.

And down in Vera Cruz, Mexico, screen diva Andrea Palma becomes a Dietrich-esque prostitute after her boyfriend sleeps with her, kills her dad, and then runs off with another girl, and a troupe of carnival clowns lays siege to her father's funeral procession. Really, what other choice did she have? Read about it.

Battles without Honor and Humanity

To prepare for a new series that's currently in the planning stages (partly because I miss doing the "Best Pictures from the Outside In" series, which is on hiatus), I'm watching and writing about Japanese gangster/exploitation films. I started with The Yakuza Papers (1973-74), a six-film series about dishonor among thieves in postwar Japan. Read about the first film.

Away We Go to Austin with Todd P

Wrote a couple reviews.

Away We Go starts out as the worst film in the world. Then it gets better. A LOT better. Read the rest.

Todd P Goes to Austin was the best film we showed at the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival in March. Read about it.

Thank You, James Rocchi

You've simplified my life with this sentence from your review of Transformers: ROTFL, which I refuse to see:

"And no, I can't shut my brain off and have fun, anymore than I could rip out my tongue and enjoy a meal, because my brain is where I feel fun."

I couldn't have said it better myself. No one could have.

Drag Me to Hell: I love it.

I can't remember the last time I had so much fun at the movies.

Read about it.

Star Trek: I don't like it.

J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot would be passable as a sci-fi film if not for the title: this is supposed to be a Star Trek film, and this is a long, long way from anything that Gene Roddenberry imagined. Star Trek is supposed to ponder and consider; this film smirks and explodes. (It also shines bright lights into the camera, but more on that later.)

Read the rest.

Extra: He made old Star Trek look like new Star Trek!

Lymelife

It would be easy to dismiss Lymelife as yet another in an endless line of "evil suburbs" dramedies, with shades of American Beauty family crises, but it's notable that the suburbs don't come off as the bad guy here. They're not a seething marsh of unhappiness that sucks the life and joy out of otherwise good people. In fact, I'd say the best thing about the film is that you get the clear sense that, aside from the unfortunate Lyme disease scare, any and all of these problems could manifest had the film taken place in the precious Brooklyn that the Bartlett family fled for rural Long Island. Affairs, bullies, splintering marriages, budding sexual relationships, father-son complications—the film blames none of this on the suburbs. If Steven and Derick Martini, the cowriters and likely codirectors (only Derick took credit), have any particular gift or insight into the human condition, it's their clear knowledge that most real problems of human interaction are internal, not native to a particular place. The only problem is that this insight is the only really notable thing about the film.

Read the rest.

The Killer Inside Casey Affleck

"It's a good act, but it's easy to overdo."

Casey Affleck is starring in Michael Winterbottom's upcoming adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, and I'm more excited about a film adaptation of one of my favorite books than, perhaps, I have ever been. First, there's the casting of Affleck, who is perfect.

Lean and wiry; a mouth that looked all set to drawl. A typical Western-country peace officer, that was me. Maybe friendlier looking than the average. Maybe a little cleaner cut. But on the whole typical. That's what I was, and I couldn't change. Even if it was safe, I doubted that I could change. I'd pretended so long that I no longer had to.

What he's "pretending" is that he's a likable, easygoing lunk who bores the shit out of people with long conversations loaded with tired aphorisms ("I tell you the way I look at it, a man doesn't get any more out of life than he puts into it."), when underneath he's a brilliant, savage killer. At the beginning of the novel he'd managed to suppress "the sickness" for fourteen years, but his relationship with a prostitute (played here by Jessica Alba for some unfortunate reason) sets him off again.

Stanley Kubrick described this novel as "possibly the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." The covers of thrillers always bear that kind of exaggeration, usually supplied with exclamation points by helpful book designers, but in this case the blurb doesn't quite cover it. I'd remove the "possibly," along with the "first-person," because this novel is quite simply the scariest book I've ever read. It's 244 pages inside the head of a frightening, believable lunatic. Stacy Keach, now king of the stage historical drama, played Lou Ford in a 1976 film that I haven't seen.

Although Thompson wrote the screenplay for Kubrick's amazing Paths of Glory, his relationship with the movies hasn't been good. Directors as varied as Stephen Frears, Roger Donaldson, James Foley, and Bernard Tavernier have tackled his novels, but none of them has grasped that peculiarly Thompsonian edgy craziness. The ones I've seen have either been bad (After Dark, My Sweet; the Getaway remake with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger) or seemed to miss Thompson's particular kind of insanity (The Grifters, which is otherwise a good film). And one of the most popular, Sam Peckinpah's 1972 take on The Getaway, manages a happy ending, eliding the surreal, horrible-ever-after that Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw's characters faced in the novel; the real getaway happened when McQueen balked and had Walter Hill rewrite Thompson's script. The Tavernier (Coup de torchon, based on Thompson's Pop. 1280) I haven't seen, and most look forward to. At least, until now.

The only real question is which Winterbottom will show up. The restless, probing, intelligent director of A Mighty Heart, who might concentrate on the beggar's banquet of personalities in Thompson's fictional Central City? The sober, cold, calculating director of The Claim, who might delve into the story of Lou Ford and his father and adopted brother, who knew of his sickness but chose to cover for him? Or the pretentious wanker behind 9 Songs, who will fuck things up? Here's hoping it's one of the first two.

Holy Crap I Wrote Something

A brief review, but still: something. Richard Pryor ... Here and Now.

Two somethings! My Sister Eileen (1942). I'm back!

One Last Goatie

The first-ever Goatie for Best Focus Pulling in a Feature Film goes to Leigh Gold for Last Chance Harvey.

That's right. Best Focus Pulling. The focus puller, often called First Assistant Camera, is the person who changes the focus on the camera within a shot, sometimes to keep the focus when the camera or actors are moving, and sometimes to shift the focus to another element in the frame. Most people have probably never thought of focus pulling before, but it's an essential and unheralded part of filmmaking.

Leigh's work in Last Chance Harvey is the second best thing about this underrated film, after Emma Thompson's reminder of what an amazing actress she is, and before Dustin Hoffman's reminder that he's a really good actor too. The bulk of the film is shot with an amazingly shallow depth of field; there's basically one point of focus, and everything between that point and the camera, and everything behind that point, is out of focus. Reaching back into my hazy memory of the single filmmaking class I took, I believe this involves using telephoto lenses, but I could be misremembering.

All I know is that the incredibly tight focus in this film is astounding, especially in the riverfront scenes late in the film where Hoffman's trying to convince Thompson that he's not a total asshole. Thompson's face is the center of the frame, the center of the film, and for a few seconds it feels like the center of the world—Leigh Gold's focus-pulling ensures that our attention is directed to the proper place. The focus is so tight that Thompson's gorgeous cheekbones are in focus, but her stray hairs, caught in the no-man's land between those cheeks and the camera, are out of focus. That's right—anything outside Emma's anguished face, including her hair, is an afterthought to Gold's singleminded attention.

Bravo, Leigh Gold, whoever you are. I admired your work in Casino Royale, and it tickles me that you got your start in Muppetland. (Even if it wasn't on the good Muppet films.)

BPFTOI 14: How Forrest Was My Gump

Mike: This episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In is a milestone in the admittedly brief (in entries, if not in time) history of this series. For the first time, gone is the middling crap we're often forced to discuss. Instead, fate has allowed us to pair two earth-shattering films, films that redefined the very art of cinema in their respective eras. From 1941 we have a movie that's topped dozens of lists of the greatest films ever made. Its spectacular cinematography spawned countless imitators, and its labyrinthine plot still has few equals. From 1994 we have what is arguably its modern equivalent, a film whose brilliant dialogue, fragmented plot structure, and myriad pop-cultural references spawned countless imitators, including some by this film's own director. Dear readers, it is my pleasure to present the Best Picture winners from 1941 and 1994, Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction.

Nick: Hon, I hate to be the bearer of notorious mistakes, but I think you need to hit reload on your Oscar page and look a little closer.

And hang in there—one of the movies is perfectly fine! You'll see!

Nathaniel: Nick the killjoy. Next thing you'll be telling me that I should cancel my 50th anniversary celebration of Vertigo's Best Picture & Director win on April 6th this year! I've already ordered the cake shaped like the Mission San Juan Bautista's bell tower. That sweep for Gigi is pure fiction. A conspiracy hoax!

[sigh]

But as for the Academy-stamped winners of '41 and '94. Well, you lose some you lose some. This is not to say that I didn't find grace notes worth appreciating in How Green Was My Valley buried somewhere in its rubble. I'm guessing it was the weight of all that earnestness that caused the coal mine to collapse in on itself. There's only so much sober nostalgia a structure can take.

Anyway, I sincerely hope that BP '41 is the one that Nick deems "perfectly fine" and not BP '94 or I'm going to need to fly to Chicago for an intervention. I thought I hated Forrest Gump in 1994. I hadn't seen it since then but the past 15 years weren't kind to it. It's a pandering corny stinker from frame one with that damn feather and big score. I don't even know how to parcel out all my problems with it. I suspect I hate it as much as Forrest loves Jenny.

Nick: Except that Forrest may or may not know what love is, whereas I feel sure that you know what hate is. Also what cynicism is. And what tone-deafness is. And what....

Well, wait. Mike, make a sound that lets us know what you think of Gump, and then maybe we can figure out how quickly we can get this one out of the way. I'm proposing a quick "Top 5 Things I Hate Most About Forrest Gump" list from each of us. I'm curious how closely they'll overlap. Or, as Tom Hanks would say, "OH-vurr-LAYYY-upp!"

Nathaniel: OK, I'll bite on that box of chocolates. (Don't read until you've composed your own.) Here are the five things I hate most about Forrest Gump:

05 That twee feather. Barf.
04 "Run Forrest Run" ... I can only take so much hokum in movies.
03 The narration / bus stop framing device. Who in their right mind would sit on that bench for even a minute listening to him drone one. And the film lasts for 142!
02 The way it keeps reminding us that being like Forrest (apolitical, passive, simple) is preferable to being like Jenny (political, searching, complicated).

01 That cute joke of his mic going out when he talks about Vietnam: "...and that's all I have to say about that." Evading difficult reflections on what wars mean and how we end up in them and playing it for comedy instead? Reprehensible I'd say. But this movie would accuse me of overthinking it. Forrest Gump to its audience: DON'T THINK!!! Just do as your momma and country tells you and everything will be fine.

Mike: Here's my top (bottom?) five things I hate about Forrest Gump. When you read them, imagine my voice becoming more strident and angry as we get toward the nadir.

5. How many syllables Tom Hanks stray-ett-chez words out to. "Jenny" clocked in at five, I think, and "Dan" at least three. He won for this? He sounded like he was voicing Saturday morning cartoons on obscure cable channels.

4. How it has some pretty astounding special effects that still hold up after 15 years (can't say that about most big-budget action movies), but it used most of them in essentially meaningless gimmicks. Only Lieutenant Day-ee-un's missing legs were worth the effort.

3. How apolitical it got once the 1980s and the morally and politically corrupt Reagan era rolled around—where was Gump during Iran Contra, the hostage crisis, the savings and loan scandal, the erosion of the social safety net? Oh, right: he was inventing stupid catch phrases and silly iconic images.

2. How fucking conservative it is about the Vietnam era. The only antiwar people we see are loudmouthed blowhards, drug addicts, and abusive boyfriends.

1. The fact that it won all the awards that Pulp Fiction deserved. I know, I know—I should hate it for all its intrinsic flaws, not things extrinsic to it, but it will always go down on my list as the biggest "We are completely out of touch" sign in the Academy's history.

I need to calm down. Does anyone have a chocolate?

Nick: Okay, I've been a good little soldier and skipped over the content of the lists. But I do see that you asked for a chocolate, Mike. You can have as many as you want, and thank God you didn't ask for any shrimp, because:

1. The blatant racism: Mykelti Williamson may well be doing his best to make the role work as written (!) and allow his performance to jell with the crazy thing Tom Hanks is doing, but... REALLY? Surely among the Top 10 most indefensible roles of the decade.

2. The running. WHAT. THE. F----?!!!

3. The (pop) music: constant, decontextualized, and as trite as the silliest "compilation" CD in the $1.99 bin at Target. A low-water mark in the grand sweepstakes of What Hath The Big Chill Wrought? And the orchestral score is almost as bad.

4. The blatant misogyny: Sally Field sleeping her way to Forrest's enrollment in school. The unbelievably crass way that the script milks an "isn't he dim?" punchline out of Forrest's misunderstanding of Jenny's childhood abuse. Everything involving Jenny's childhood. Nearly everything involving Jenny. Jesus.

5. The evaporation of any content, complexity, sensitivity, or stakes from the way we think about history.

Those are mostly unranked, except for the last one. Now we play Scattergories and find out if we repeated each other! Meanwhile, I'll throw out there that amidst everything, I did feel Tom Hanks took some risks with the character (admirable in a sense, even when some of them don't pay off), and he did manage to play dumbfounded adoration and (more surprisingly) dumbfounded grief pretty strongly, especially within the limited emotional borders of this piece. And some of the visual effects hold up to the "astonishing" label that the effects in Benjamin Button, for me, didn't, despite nakedly striving for the same rep. But that's .... wait for it .... all I have to say about that.

Mike: So we're done with Gump? Right? Because I don't want to talk about it anymore.

Nathaniel: Yes we're done talking about Gump. I suppose we'll have to wait for the comments to hear a suitable defense for its numerous sins against the cinema—I'm noticing it's still sittting pretty in various top 100 lists.

Mike: I want to talk about John Ford and what I think Nick called the "John Fordiest of John Ford's films." HGWMV doesn't necessarily deserve its reputation as the film that stole Citizen Kane's crown, because it's a damn good film, nearly a masterpiece, and yes, the most succinct statement of John Ford's particular ethos—respect for mom, God, community, and fairness are the cardinal virtues, and hypocrisy is hated above all things. It carries with it that earnestness that Nathaniel disliked, so I can see how it would be hard for some people to love it, but love it I did. It's not his greatest film (sorry, Kyle), but it's up there. It's basically the second best of his small-town Americana films (after Judge Priest)—take away those Welsh accents, and you're in Appalachia or some other American mining area. And parting from his usual Southern setting frees him from the regrettable (some would say jaw-droppingly racist) stereotypes his small-town films embrace.

He's such a brilliant visual filmmaker—all props to Gregg Toland's pioneering deep-focus work in Kane, but Arthur Miller's work here is the pinnacle of classic studio cinematography: the heartbreaking shot where Bronwyn gives birth soon after Ivor's death, and it looks like Ivor's ghost is watching over the scene (I realize it's another brother's shadow, but the effect is the same); the elevator rising out of the ruined mine, bearing Mr. Morgan's body and composed like something out of a Renaissance painting; the women turned suddenly into nuns bearing witness at the wreckage; that ineffably sad first/last kiss between Maureen O'Hara and Walter Pidgeon. The performances are all top-notch, especially Donald Crisp's distillation of fatherhood in all its merits and demerits, but also Sara Allgood, who gives Jane Darwell a run for her money as the best Ford female supporting performance (and her speech to the striking miners is even better than Ma Joad's "We'll go on forever" speech).

I'm blathering. Someone else say something.

Nathaniel: HGWMV. I did not dislike it. I suspect it comes down to a taste issue. I'm not necessarily proud of this but I believe that I have too much modern snark in me for something this sober. The film seems frozen in time by very design. Did it already feel old-fashioned in 1941? Especially standing next to Citizen Kane? I love melodrama and actively enjoy heightened retro homage but when there's only reverence for the past with no distancing artifice, I have trouble. Never been one of those "everything was so much better in the past!" types.

Loved the cinematography and composition choices. The repeated longshot of that curved steep road to the coal mine, the only work in town, and how richly that shot was mined (ha ha) for storytelling throughout. It was like the road was a slightly twisted spinal cord for the achey body of the village or maybe its primary artery or central nervous system. The cumulative affect got to me. And Ford's love of community rang out loudly and beautifully. I was a complete mess when the convalescing mamma (Sara Allgood) emerged from her house to that throng of respectful apologetic townsfolk.

But even good things (love of community) have a dark side. I was completely turned off by the Roddy McDowell arc. There's a bit of lip service paid to "he should stay in school" once he's decided to respect his family by remaining in poverty and dead end jobs with them. But mostly I think the storytelling underlines this is a noble decision. It rang true sociologically speaking (you don't have to look far to find examples of public wariness regarding higher education and certainly some less advantaged communities wear their lack of education/money like a badge of honor) but it really bothered me. Give the kid a chance. I kept wanting to see a more progressive movie wherein we follow the two brothers who abandoned the sinking ship for America.

Mike: I didn't need any more than Donald Crisp's "I'm goin' to git drunk!" reaction to Roddy's decision to underline his heartbreak. And this community did have a dark side. The film is framed as a "wow, things were so much better back then" homage, but so many of those reminiscences are of heartbreak and cruelty. Ford spends a lot of time on how quickly the community is willing to turn on the less fortunate—the woman who gets pregnant and is excommunicated, the scandal when O'Hara comes home without her husband and the resulting rumors about Pidgeon, and so on. Ford loves this time and place, but his eyes are wide open about it.

Nick: My favorite thing about How Green Was My Valley is the soot that just seems to be hanging everywhere in the air, and the way that Miller and Ford evoke this look not to make a simply didactic point about how miserable life is in a coal town but to establish the same point you just made, Mike: the overlapping beauty and sadness of these memories, and the thin line between nostalgia and regret. I agree that it's a gorgeously and thoughtfully photographed movie—so much detail and texture, and so many gradations of light and dark. You really feel the cycles of the day and the season, sometimes within a single shot.

That said, I think the scenes that privilege McDowall betray a hokiness that the film largely avoids (or at least complicates) when it dramatizes the dynamics among the adults, or between the adults and their environment. At the expense of knocking a kid, McDowall is part of the problem for me: he's just so gormlessly, sentimentally earnest. His performance is the one place where I wish the original director, William Wyler, had stuck around to shape the work, though Wyler's the one who picked the kid, so who knows. There are squishy spots elsewhere in the dramaturgy, like Allgood's harangue against the miners, that seem like they're from a different, frankly a pushier movie than the gracefully devastating sequence at the mine-shaft elevator. Again, par for the course with early-40s Ford, at least in my experience.

Speaking of "who knows," though: can I air a bit of confusion? IMDb says that How Green debuted in New York in December of '41 and in LA in January '42. By Academy rules, as witness the eligibility ruling on Casablanca two years later, shouldn't this have made it a '42 film? Am I still grasping at straws to give Kane, Welles, and Toland the Oscars we all wish they had?

Nathaniel: Ack. Don't go there. Then How Green would've taken Casablanca's Oscar. Because it's squishier just as you say. Either year it's trouble! Not that it's not a good film but damn that Oscar win can deflate your reputation quickly if you beat something far superior. See als—NEVER MIND. I was going to name a few years but there are too many to choose from.

Nick: Just to clarify, a How Green/Casablanca square-off wouldn't be possible; Casablanca got moved to '43 for the same reasons it seems to me that How Green should've been moved to '42 yet somehow wasn't. But you're right, whatever happens, even if you try to gerrymander things in retrospect, something always falls casualty. The Ford movie would have just joined the ranks of those other '42 movies that trounced, say, The Magnificent Ambersons. But we'll get to that next time. And anyway, you were saying...

Nathaniel: To twist Mike's words, I love this part (anything with Allgood) or that (anything with the unconsummated romance) but my eyes are wide open about the whole: the corn of the McDowall story, the uneven acting, those uncomfortably dim trips to the sister in law's house or the distracting way that the Morgans are supposed to be poverty stricken but they keep inviting the entire town into their house and they have enough food and liquour for all. This conversation has helped me respect the film but not love it. I didn't feel at all tied to the town, I was ready to pack up my knapsack, take my share of the wages, and be off.

Mike: And that's such a heavy knapsack that Nick and I will help you carry it into 1942, when Orson Welles suffered another defeat at the hands of tradition with Mrs. Miniver's victory over The Magnificent Ambersons, and 1993, when a handful of "greatest films ever made" (at least according to me and Nick) duked it out for supremacy. But before we go, dear readers, do you have anything to add? We could rent one of those coal carts if the load gets too heavy.

Previous BPFTOI episodes

CIMMfest: It's a Wrap

The jury's votes are in, and they're all good films (otherwise I wouldn't have programmed them), but here are my favorites from the inaugural CIMMfest.

Best Documentary Feature: Todd P Goes to Austin (USA), directed by Jay Buim. The underground bands in this road movie-cum-concert film are getting to where they aren't so underground anymore, so I wonder where Todd Patrick, DIY impresario, tirelessly driven patron saint of loud music played in unorthodox places, and sometimes pretentious blowhard, will turn next. I hope Jay Buim will be there to document it, because his debut feature is a perfectly blended examination of the backbreaking work that goes into putting on a show outside the tottering, gasping behemoth of the music industry, and the contagious charge of energy that results when the work pays off.

Runner-Up: Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year with Andre Williams (USA), directed by Tricia Todd and Eric Matthies.

Best Narrative Feature: The Life and Death of Gotel Botel (Israel), directed by Daniel Sivan. The somewhat messy debut feature of Daniel Sivan shows the rise and fall of musician who trades his friends and artistic legitimacy for fame as a glam-rock messiah. It's not a new topic, but Sivan and company attack it with such gusto, throwing elements of a half-dozen genres at the screen, that it's easy to forgive its occasional incoherence. The sequence where rock star Gotel Botel is reborn—in a mish-mash of reality TV confessional, musical theater, animation, and flames—was the visual highlight of the festival.

Runner-up: Punching the Clown (USA), directed by Gregori Viens.

Best Documentary Short: Hooray for Anything (Australia), directed by Nicholas Godfrey. The South Australian underground bands featured in this doc could show Todd P a thing or two about DIY—they eschew roofs and walls, plugging in and holding impromptu concerts wherever they find electrical outlets on the street. The film is shot like it's undercover, full of grainy, pitch-black, and night-vision footage of teens rocking out until the cops chase them away.

Runner-up: Jaffawiye (Israel), directed by Dan Deutsch.

Best Narrative Short: Pavane (Canada), directed by Paul Quarrington. When I accepted this film to the festival, I told its creators, producer Judith Keenan and writer/director Paul Quarrington, that it was "a great demonstration of how much life and backstory one can fit in a short running time. I think it has more to say than most feature-length films." I forgot to mention how much it gains from repeated viewings: peerless camera work and shot framing by Quarrington and cinematographer Gregor Hagey, fascinatingly opaque performances by Geraint Wyn-Davies and Ted Dysktra, and a bravura animated sequence by Chris Minos.

Runner-up: Botnik! (USA), directed by Jackie Smessaert Brennan.

Best Music Video: The Heist and the Accomplice - "More Control" (USA), directed by Steve Daniels. Driven primarily by a love of actual celluloid film, director Steve Daniels created a super-8 masterpiece that quotes liberally from such revival house staples as The Blob and The Tingler. Pitting the band members against the very film they're being shot on, Daniels creates an eloquent and funny look at how media consumes us as we consume media.

Runner-up: Il Tandre Neu - "Exit Wound" (USA), directed by Lucy Munger.

Special Jury Award for Best Long-Form Short Film (longer than 20 minutes, shorter than 45): Yard Work Is Hard Work (USA), directed by Jodie Mack. Gorgeously, obsessively animated using stop-motion and thousands of magazine cutouts, Mack's epic about reality bitch-slapping youthful dreams into submission is eerily prescient, featuring a Sondheim-style song about adjustable rate mortgages.

Special Jury Award for Best Film That Wasn't Eligible for Competition: Tampico (USA), directed by Suree Towfighnia. She finished a month before our cutoff date, which is too bad, because her intimate portrait of a Chicago busker is by far the best short doc, and one of the best films period, that we screened.

The Greatest Rock Movie Ever

Is A Hard Day's Night, obviously.

But what do leading Chicago film critics, music critics, and historians think? Find out at CIMMfest's "Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Movie Ever" panel at 3:30 pm on Sunday, March 8 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, when the members of this distinguished panel duke it out.

Chicago Reader film critic JR Jones thinks it's The Girl Can't Help It (1955), directed by Frank Tashlin, starring Jayne Mansfield, and featuring performances by Ray Anthony, Fats Domino, the Platters, and Little Richard.

Film historian and author Arnie Bernstein thinks it's Rock 'n' Roll High School, directed by Alan Arkush and the uncredited Joe Dante and Jerry Zucker, starring PJ Soles and Ron Howard's big brother, and featuring the Ramones.

Jim DeRogatis, Chicago Sun-Times music critic and co-host of Chicago Public Radio's Sound Opinions, thinks it's This Is Spinal Tap, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Spinal Tap.

The Onion film critic Keith Phipps hasn't told me what he thinks it is because he just confirmed for the panel today.

Underground filmmaker and CIMMfest jury chair Lech Kowalski hasn't told me either, but he's been really busy watching 65 official selections and shooting a movie. But he did make DOA, Born to Lose: The Last Rock 'n' Roll Movie, and the impossible-to-find Unfinished (Stations of the Cross), which we're showing at the festival, so I bet his choice will be interesting.

People Love Robert Pattinson

We sold out CIMMfest's first 290-seat screening of Pattinson's new film How to Be in a day; the second screening is well on its way to selling out too. It got so crazy that I had to write up a special set of instructions to answer all the questions that were pouring in. I had no idea how popular he was.

(I'm blogging about Pattinson again because I like getting lots of hits. Even if it's not about me.)

The Rolling Stones @ CIMMfest

Well, not in person. But we have a film about eight of the most passionate fans in the history of rock 'n' roll in It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like Keith), an Italian film about what it means to devote your life to the love of music. These guys drive all around Europe following their rock heroes, and in this film, we find out whether they will achieve their greatest dream: to meet a Stone in person.

And yes, there's never-before-seen footage of the pre-fossilized Mick Jagger & Co., shot from the audience at a 1973 show in Milan.

"But how can I see it?" you ask. It's easy! Just come to the Chicago Cultural Center, 70 E. Washington, on Sunday, March 8 at 1:30 pm with a suggested $8 donation in your hand, or you might want to reserve a seat.

(Funny, I just realized we've continued the "Beatles vs. Stones" debate here at CIMMfest by programming this film and America's Lost Band at the same time.)

The Beatles @ CIMMfest!

Well, not in person. But this isn't about them anyway, darn it! This is about The Remains, the Boston quartet that opened for the Fab Four on their second US tour. Hundreds of thousands saw The Remains in concert that fateful summer (were you there?), but then, poised on the brink of hugeness and stardom, the band broke up. Went their separate ways. Now, 40 years later, they've regrouped in America's Lost Band to reminisce about the past with surprisingly little regret.

And yes, there's never-before-seen footage of that other band on the tour. What were they called?

"But how can I see it?" you ask. It's easy! Just come to the St. Paul's Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Avenue, on Sunday, March 8 at 1:00 pm with $8 in your hand, or you might want to buy a ticket.

Matt and Kim, The Deathset, Mika Miko, Dan Deacon, and others @ CIMMfest

Well, not in person. But we have the Chicago premiere of Todd P Goes to Austin (short trailer, more on that page), in which Brooklyn DIY pioneer Todd Patrick loads a bunch of his favorite bands into various grungy vans and drives cross-country to put on a huge outdoor music festival in a parking lot at the same time as the South by Southwest festival.

As an added bonus, we're showing local filmmaker/animator Jodie Mack's brilliant short Yard Work Is Hard Work on real-live 16mm film!

And as an added added bonus, Chicago band Percolator is going to blow the roof off after the screenings!

"But how do I see it?" you ask. It's easy! Just show up at 6:30 pm on Wednesday, March 4 at the St. Paul's Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Avenue, with $8 in your hand and maybe some earplugs, because it will get loud. You might want to buy a ticket ahead of time.

Andrew Bird, Sarah Silverman, Flight of the Conchords, Louis CK, all @ CIMMfest

Well, not in person. But they're all in Largo (trailer), a documentary/concert film about one night at the famed Los Angeles club. And they're not alone: the lineup also includes Jon Brion, Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, Fiona Apple, John C. Reilly, Aimee Mann, Eels mastermind Mark Oliver Everett, Michael Penn, Jackson Browne, and more.

"But how can I see it?" you ask. It's easy! Show up on Saturday, March 7 at 9:00 pm at the St. Paul's Cultural Center at 2215 W. North Ave. with your $8 in hand, or you might want to buy a ticket.

Francois Begaudeau from The Class @ CIMMfest

Well, not in person. But before he was the writer and star of that Palm d'Or winning and Oscar nominated film, he was a rock star in France, and we have the world premiere of a documentary/concert film about his band, Zabriskie Point. It's called Je Suis Une Videomachine (I Am a Video Machine), it's directed by his bandmate Xavier Esnault, and the only place you can see it is at CIMMfest.

"But how can I see it?" you ask. It's easy! Show up at the St. Paul's Cultural Center at 2215 W. North Avenue on Sunday, March 8 at 3:00 pm with your $8 in hand, but you might want to buy a ticket.

Monty Python @ CIMMfest

Well, not in person. But we have The Seventh Python, a documentary about Neil Innes, who performed and wrote songs with the Pythons, had his first single produced by Paul McCartney, was a Rutle, and wrote a song with Oasis. Plus he likes to wear a plastic duck on his head. The film features in-depth interviews with John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.

And Burt Kearns and Brett Hudson, the film's director and producer, are going to be there in person to answer questions. I don't know if they're going to sing or wear ducks.

"But how can I see this?" you ask. It's easy! Just show up at the Chicago Cultural Center at 8:00 pm on Saturday, March 7, with your suggested $8 donation in hand. But seating is limited, so maybe you want you reserve your seat.

Sonic Youth @ CIMMfest

Well, not in person. But we have the Chicago premiere of Sleeping Nights Awake (trailer), a concert film slash backstage documentary that provides the first really good cinematic exploration of the underground music legends.

And it was shot by high school kids! Reno, Nevada's nonprofit Project Moonshine teaches kids how to be filmmakers in the best possible way—by having them make a movie under the tutelage of a professional director.

"But how can I see it?" you ask. It's easy! It's playing at 9:30 pm on Friday, March 6 at the new St. Paul's Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave. But you might want to buy a ticket.

OMG ROBERT PATTINSON @ CIMMfest!!!

Well, not in person. But we're going to have the Chicago premiere of How to Be, in which Mr. Handsome Sparkly Vampire plays a sad-sack wannabe troubadour who can't get his twentysomething angsty life together, so he hires a life coach to move in with him and get things back on track. His legions of fans will swoon when he bares his tortured soul and float away into the clouds when he croons; most everyone will be pleased, because it's a good movie—otherwise I wouldn't have programmed it.

"How can I see this?" you ask? It's easy! You can just show up at the Chicago Cultural Center at 3:00 pm on Sunday, March 8, with your $8 donation in hand, or you can reserve a seat at Brown Paper Tickets.

The first screening (290 seats) sold out in less than a day. But fear not! We added a second screening at 5:15 pm, same day, same location. I seriously suggest that you reserve your seat now. If those sell out, we're reserving a limited number of seats for CIMMfest weekend pass holders on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Wilco @ CIMMfest

Well, not in person. But we'll have the Chicago premiere of their concert film Ashes of American Flags at the Music Box at two evening screenings, 7:00 and 10:00 pm, on Monday, March 9 as part of the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival. Director Brendan Canty (the drummer from Fugazi) will be there to answer questions. This is a one-night-only opportunity to see Chicago's favorite adopted musical sons in concert on the big screen.

You might want to buy your ticket now, since the last time Wilco was at the Music Box (I Am Trying to Break Your Heart) the first show was sold out.

Four Thoughts on The Wrestler

1. Good, but still a really familiar trip down well-traveled (perhaps over-traveled) paths. Honestly, does she have to be a stripper? To paraphrase Barton Fink: "Mickey Rourke! A wrestlin' pitcher! Whaddaya need, a road map?"

2. Was Rourke's face the result of makeup, bad plastic surgery, or Nerf? Still, he's amazing, and if Sean Penn didn't deserve it more, I'd say give him an Oscar.

3. I sort of agree with Armond White. This is a Blue State film by someone who I don't think really knows or understands his Red State subjects.

4. After two viewings, I still give it 3.5 goats.

CIMMfest

Q: What's up, Mike slash goatdog? You haven't been blogging much, and you haven't reviewed a movie in forever!

A: I was/am programming CIMMfest.

Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year with Andre Williams (USA, directed by Tricia Todd and Eric Matthies) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Andre Williams has recorded hit records, written hit songs, and worked with legends of the industry including Berry Gordy, Ike Turner, and Stevie Wonder. Andre has also struggled throughout his 72 years with addiction, poverty, homelessness, and the legal system. Andre has never stopped driving his creative visions forward, regardless of cost or consequence, but the consequences turn out to be severe as his addictive history catches up with him. Director Tricia Todd in person. (Saturday, March 5, 7:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

All the World's a Stage (India, directed by Nirmal Chander, documentary/concert film, 60 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! For centuries since they arrived from Africa, the Sidi community in western India have struggled against discrimination and indifference, relying on their devotional music for identity and stability. As the Sidi Goma musical group grows in popularity, will they be able to maintain their cultural identity? (Friday, March 6, 3:30 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 70 E. Washington)

America's Lost Band (USA, directed by Adam Stich, documentary/concert film, 65 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Hundreds of thousands of people saw The Remains in concert in 1966, but the Boston quartet was overshadowed by the headliner—the Beatles on their first US tour. But what would have happened if they had stuck together after coming to the brink of rock greatness instead of breaking up and going their separate ways? Forty years later, they regroup to share their memories and rock out one more time. (Friday, March 6, 1:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

Becoming Pony Boi (USA, directed by Sergio Myers, fiction/comedy, 87 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Real-life documentarian and reality TV producer Sergio Myers takes the mockumentary to the next level, playing middle-aged Jewish executive who embarks on a quest to become rap superstar Pony Boi, "the Hugh Hefner of Hip-Hop." Myers actually recorded a hit record and single featuring DaBrat but found fame fickle, blurring the boundaries between his screen persona and his reality. Alongside the plentiful laughs is a biting satire of the manufacture of celebrity. Director Sergio Myers in person. (Saturday, March 7, 3:00 pm, Th!nkArt Salon, 1530 N. Paulina)

But We Have the Music (France, directed by Shanti Masud, documentary/experimental, 43 min.) US PREMIERE! This experimental documentary film about young people listening to various rock songs is an intimate exploration of our personal reactions to music. (Friday, March 6, 6:00 pm, Th!nkArt Salon, 1530 N. Paulina)

A Cricket in the Court of Akbar (USA, directed by Andrew Mendelson, documentary, 82 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! A sitar player from Texas who became the first Westerner to compete in and win the Sri Mahendra Bhatt Music Competition in Rajasthan, Andrew Mendelson takes us along as he returns to India to compete in the Tournament of Champions, the Sur Sadak, but discovers that his Western identity is in direct conflict with his desire to gain acceptance in the world of Indian classical music. (Saturday, March 7, 1:30 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 70 E. Washington)

A Detroit Thing (USA, directed by Anthony Brancaleone, documentary/concert film, 108 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Brancaleone explores the struggles of working-class bands in the Motor City. When the labels come looking for "the next big thing" they bring with them not only the answer to every band's rock 'n' roll dreams but a reminder--for every band to get "signed" there are a thousand who don't. Featuring Kid Rock and the Howling Diablos. Director Anthony Brancaleone in person. (Friday, March 6, 4:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

East of Paradise (France/USA, directed by Lech Kowalski, 108 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! At the start of World War II, Maria Werla was taken from Poland and made a slave in a Soviet work camp in Siberia. "My mother asked, 'Why do you want to film me now'? I could not give her an answer... All I can say is that I need to arrive to some yet unknown place to take sweet revenge, shaking my insanity like a fist at the world, screaming and kicking that my mother and I survived". East of Paradise is a diptych about two characters who have many and one story to tell. DIRECTOR LECH KOWALSKI & PRODUCER ODILE ALLARD IN PERSON! (Sunday, March 8, 3:30 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

The Eternity Man (Australia, directed by Julien Temple, fiction/opera, 64 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Music video pioneer and punk rock chronicler Julien Temple (The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten) takes on another bombastic niche genre: opera. Filmed in jaw-dropping HD, Eternity Man tells the true-life story of outsider artist Arthur Stace, an Australian homeless man who for 35 years covered Sydney with an evocative chalk signature reading simply "Eternity." "A mesmerising, beautifully filmed work... Blindingly good: loopy, addictive, brilliant." — The Observer. (Saturday, March 7, 1:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

Family Meeting (Finland, directed by Heikki Kossi, documentary/concert film, 84 min.) US PREMIERE! The Wentus Blues Band has been kicking it old school for the past 20 years, working with such blues legends as Louisiana Red, Eddie Kirkland, Mick Taylor, and Eric Bibb. This film is an exciting mixture of earth-shaking concert footage, featuring many of the musicians they've worked with along the way, and backstage life as Scandinavia's premiere blues experience looks back over its storied history. PRODUCER/FOUNDER ROBBAN HAGNAS IN PERSON! (Sunday, March 8, 3:00 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Hardtimes Killin' Floor Blues (France, directed by Henri-Jean Debon, documentary, 60 min. US PREMIERE! In 1992, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, singer of the Gun Club, was living in London. He had no label contract anymore, and barely any money. And his health was deteriorating... (Saturday, March 7, 5:00 pm, Th!nkArt Salon, 1530 N. Paulina)

It's in the Blood: Leo Abshire and the Cajun Tradition (USA, directed by Cyndi Moran & Eric Scholl, documentary, 58 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! This intimate biography traces the personal history of Cajun music legend and instrument maker Leo Abshire as a musician and oil worker against the larger backdrop of the Cajun tradition. Weaving together exciting live performances, candid interviews with Abshire, and input from historians and musicians, local filmmakers Cyndi Moran and Eric Scholl created a lively, entertaining, but still educational film about the one of the best musicians most people have never heard of. Directors Cyndi Moran & Eric Scholl in person. (Friday, March 6, 3:30 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like Keith) (Italy, directed by Piergiorgio Gay, documentary, 68 min.) US PREMIERE! Eight fortysomething Italians demonstrate the meaning of the word "fan" (and its origins in "fanatic") with their decades-long obsession with the Rolling Stones. If you've seen the Stones in Europe, you've probably seen Max, holding his immediately recognizable banner "AFTER ELVIS ONLY KEITH." Will they achieve their lifelong dreams of meeting their idols in the flesh? Featuring never-before-seen footage of a 1973 Rolling Stones concert in Milan. (Sunday, March 8, 1:30 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Je Suis Une Videomachine (I Am a Videomachine) (France, directed by Xavier Esnault, documentary/concert film, 100 min.) WORLD PREMIERE! Documentary about the legendary French Rock Group Zabriskie Point, featuring Francois Begaudeau, a former punk rocker, journalist, and writer/star of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Palm d'Or winning THE CLASS. (Sunday, March 8, 3:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

Largo (USA, directed by Andrew van Baal, documentary/concert film, 112 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! An intimate club nestled away on a busy Hollywood street, Largo has garnered a reputation among performers and fans alike as a place where what's on stage truly matters. Circumventing flashy MTV-style lensing or editing, the film places its focus squarely on the musicians and comedians onstage, allowing the performances to truly shine through. Featuring Flight of the Conchords, Andrew Bird, Fiona Apple, and Sarah Silverman. (Saturday, March 7, 9:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

The Life and Death of Gotel Botel (Israel, directed by Daniel Sivan, fiction, 82 min.) WORLD PREMIERE! A misunderstood experimental musician who daylights as the vacuum cleaner in a children's play reinvents himself as a genre- and gender-bending superstar, but his newfound fame changes him in more ways than he expected. The film undergoes as many seismic shifts as he does, switching gears pell-mell and throwing in elements of mockumentaries, unprompted musical numbers, even animated sequences in its quest to keep up with Gotel's sudden rise and violent fall. (Saturday, March 7, 8:00 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Martino Unstrung: A Brain Mystery (USA/UK, directed by Ian Knox, documentary, 82 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Jazz legend Pat Martino lost his memory and his playing ability after brain surgery but fought back, relearning his music by listening to his old records. The film follows director Ian Knox and renowned neuropsychologist Paul Broks as they trace Martino's comeback while exploring the mysteries of memory and musical talent. (Saturday, March 7, 6:00 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Paraiba Meu Amor (France, directed by Bernard Robert-Charrue, documentary/concert film, 74 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Examination of music and culture of traditional forro musicians as famed French accordionist Richard Galliano travels to Brazil to perform with his childhood idols. (Friday, March 6, 2:00, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Punching the Clown (USA, directed by Gregori Viens, fiction/comedy, 92 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! A road-weary troubadour comedic comes to LA seeking fame and fortune and ends up getting more than he imagined, including a big record deal and the interest of a pretty barista, but his fleeting fame is sabotaged when his offhand compliment of a bagel spins out of control. Singer-comedian Henry Phillips plays himself, sort of, in this viciously funny satire of the music industry and Hollywood fakery. (Saturday, March 7, 6:00 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Punk East: Too Much Future (Germany, directed by Carsten Fiebeler and Michael Boehlke, 93 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Describes the history and the present-day situation of six people, who between 1979 and 1984 belonged to the first generation of punks in the GDR. They hit the walls of a system that tried to control them when they refused to be controlled by it. Whereas the social misery of English teenagers manifested itself in the outcry "no future" the socialist misery of a planned youth in the GDR could more appropriately be described with "too much future." Directors Carsten Fiebeler and Michael Boehlke in person. (Friday, March 6, 6:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

The Seventh Python (USA, directed by Burt Kearns, documentary, 92 min.) Neil Innes refuses to be famous, despite writing and performing with Monty Python, being a Rutle, writing a song with Oasis, resembling the Belgians, and generally being one of the best musical satirists around. The Seventh Python follows him as he finally braves the wilds of Hollywood, the birthplace of the fame he's been avoiding his whole life. Featuring Monty Python, Matt Groening, and Aimee Mann. DIRECTOR BURT KEARNS AND PRODUCER BRETT HUDSON IN PERSON! (Saturday, March 7, 8:00 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Shivering Beauty: Soundscape of Mongolia (Netherlands, directed by Robin Noorda, documentary, 51 min.) CHICAGO PREMEIRE! Nonnarrative film explores Mongolian culture and music, reveling revels in the vibrant color, movement, and music that thrive in the forbidding landscape. And you've never seen anything like the snake dance. (Friday, March 6, 2:00 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

Sixteen Days in China (USA, directed by Martin Atkins, documentary/concert film, 53 min.) WORLD PREMIERE! Musician Martin Atkins (Public Image Ltd., Pigface) heads to Beijing to explore the Chinese underground music scene and gets more than he bargained for, facing censorship and other interference as he attempts to pull off a five-day music fest that ends, after a great deal of difficulty, in his 2007 China Dub Soundsystem and Look Directly into the Sun albums. DIRECTOR MARTIN ATKINS IN PERSON! (Saturday, March 7, 2:00 pm, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington)

6015 Willow (Canada, directed by Mark Mullane, 82 min.) US PREMIERE! Twenty bands, seventy-two hours, three floors: when a longtime community art space closes, the indie rock scene of Halifax, Nova Scotia sent it out with a bang by rocking the house from roof to foundation--literally, as guitarists crouch in the attic, drummers pound the skins in the bathtub, and noise rockers echo through the stairways. You may not know of bands like Dog Day, North Of America, The Stolen Minks, and The Just Barelys, but you should. (Saturday, March 7, 11:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake (USA, directed by Michael Allbright, 82 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! Working with a crew of high school students from the nonprofit group Project Moonshine, director Michael Albright finally gives one of the greatest bands in history the concert film/documentary they deserve. Shot during a 2006 show in Reno, the film combines candid backstage interviews with band members and stellar performance footage, along with glimpses of the process involved in making a concert film. (Friday, March 6, 9:30 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

Unfinished (Stations of the Cross) (France/USA, directed by Lech Kowalski, documentary/concert film, 64 min.) US PREMIERE! Stations of the Cross Unfinished features never-before-seen footage of New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders playing at the Mudd Club in NYC and acting out a script inspired by a picture of Christ on his way to be crucified. Filming was interrupted when Thunders and his manager had to flee to Europe, and a lab vault lost some of the footage, but Kowalski finally completed the film with the material he managed to save. DIRECTOR LECH KOWALSKI & PRODUCER ODILE ALLARD IN PERSON! (Saturday, March 7, 9:00 pm, Th!nkArt Salon, 1530 N. Paulina)

Who Is KK Downey? (Canada, directed by Pat Kiely, fiction/comedy, 88 min.) CHICAGO PREMIERE! A rockstar wannabe and his tortured-writer best friend hatch a plan to transform the writer's grungy first novel into a bestselling memoir by creating a hipster icon, KK Downey, who instantly becomes a messianic star. They gain the fame and fortune they so desperately wanted, but at a steep price. "The real thing. Feature debut of Montreal’s Kidnapper comedy troupe is a truly funny movie." – Variety. (Saturday, March 7, 3:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

Zwarte Ogen (Black Eyes) (Netherlands, directed by Jan Bosdriesz, documentary, 100 min.) Inspired by an old gramophone record, director Jan Bosdriesz went looking for the Russian/Romanian singer Pyort Leshchenko (1908-1954) but discovered his own family history. (Friday, March 6, 2:00 pm, St. Paul Cultural Center, 2215 W. North Ave.)

Buy tickets.

The Oscar Nominations

I don't want to talk about the worst field of Best Picture nominees since I don't know when. I don't want to talk about all the love for Slumdog Millionaire, which I hate more every day. I don't want to talk about the 13 freaking nominations for the overlong and lackluster The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and I especially don't want to talk about rewarding Brad Pitt for the most boring performance of his career. Or about the utter lack of high-waisted pants in CCBB's mysteriously nominated costume design, or the fact that the makeup was never once right. Or the craptastic Original Song category, which managed to snub both the really good (no Bruce Springsteen?) and the really inventive (not one of the Forgetting Sarah Marshall songs?). Nope. Don't want to talk about these Oscar nominations.

Best I Saw in 2008: Actress

Sorry, ladies of 2008, you didn't have a chance in hell of cracking this lineup.

Vivien Leigh, Gone with the Wind (1939). It's the greatest Best Actress winning performance of all time, unless Leigh's turn in A Streetcar Named Desire deserved the title. Either way, this is earth-shaking acting. A chill just went up my back from remembering her "I'll never go hungry again" speech, but that kind of dramatic intensity is not even half of her performance.

Runners-up:

Kay Francis, One Way Passage (1932). How is it that she made this and Trouble in Paradise in the same year, but she's still largely unknown?

Janet Gaynor, Seventh Heaven (1927). Holy god, she also did Sunrise this year. The best single year of actressing in history? And I still have Street Angel to look forward to, the third film included in her historic Oscar win.

Patricia Neal, Hud (1963). It would be hard to compare to Paul Newman's smoldering sexpot, but Neal (along with Melvyn Douglas, who you'll be seeing on here shortly) even manages to outshine him at times.

Barbra Streisand, Funny Girl (1968). Stranded as she was in this ungainly mess of a movie, it's a shock that she's so great, so unafraid, and so deserving of the thousand-watt spotlight that's on her constantly.

It hurt to leave out: Claudette Colbert, Imitation of Life (1934); Mia Farrow, The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985); Jane Fonda, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969); Jean Harlow, Bombshell (1933); Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (2008); Katharine Hepburn, Holiday (1938); Carole Lombard, To Be or Not to Be (1942); and Mary Tyler Moore, Ordinary People (1980).

Best I Saw in 2008: Actor

Since I saw so few new movies in 2008, my awards are going to encompass everything I saw, including new releases, revival house viewings, and rentals.

Henry Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Fonda doesn't look like Lincoln, and he doesn't make much effort to act like Lincoln might have acted, or speak like anyone other than Henry Fonda. His performance isn't imitation, but evocation—he turns on pieces of his own personality that summon the near-mythical Lincoln of American popular history. One of the finest male performances in American cinema.

Runners-up:

Jack Benny, To Be or Not to Be (1942). If Cagney hadn't deserved it a tiny bit more for Yankee Doodle Dandy, I'd give Benny the 1942 Best Actor Oscar.

Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight (2008). Nick and Nathaniel convinced me that he's a lead; Ledger still pops up in my nightmares sometimes.

Paul Newman, Hud (1963). What did I call it in the last post? "Pheromone-dripping-sex-panther of a star turn." Yep.

Donald Sutherland, Ordinary People (1980). The best performance, the anchor of the entire film, wasn't even nominated.

It hurt to leave out: Clark Gable, Gone with the Wind (1939); John Garfield, Force of Evil (1948); Cary Grant, Holiday (1938); Rene LeFevre, The Crime of Monsieur Lange (France, 1936); James Mason, Odd Man Out (1947); Sean Penn, Milk (2008); William Powell, One Way Passage (1932); and Will Rogers, Judge Priest (1934).

Best of 2008: Rentals and Revivals

Without any further ado (if a month-long silence can be considered ado), here are the top ten films I saw on my couch, on someone else's couch, or at a revival house in 2008.

10. Gone with the Wind (1939) proves that 1939 was one of the cinema's greatest years, since it wasn't even the best 1939 film I saw last year.

9. That would be Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which is John Ford at the peak of his mythmaking abilities, and Henry Fonda at the peak of screen acting.

8. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (France, 1936) is Renoir at his devious best, making a solid case for justifiable homicide and painting a glowing picture of prewar optimism. (But the real crime is that it's still not on DVD in the United States.)

7. If Hud (1963) were only Paul Newman's pheromone-dripping-sex-panther of a star turn, well, it would still be great; but there's more, like Patricia Neal in one of the handful of best Best Actress-winning performances and James Wong Howe's heartbreaking cinematography.

6. Punishment Park (1971) might not be so frighteningly effective the next time I watch it, but it was so terrifying that I may not ever watch it again.

5. Even if The Young Girls of Rochefort (France, 1967) is a lesser film than its less-traditional predecessor The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, they're both so astoundingly good that such distinctions don't mean much.

4. Judge Priest (1934) is equal parts jaw-droppingly racist and mind-blowingly great, one of the best depictions of the rhythms of small-town life in American cinema.

3. To Be or Not to Be (1942) is the funniest movie about Nazis ever made, and one of the funniest films of the 1940s all time. And the 1942 Oscars were much poorer than they should have been, since this deserved a nom, and in some cases a win, in many categories.

2. La Chute de la maison Usher (France, 1928) showed me that silent films can be scary as hell, and that Jean Epstein might be the best director I'd never heard of before this.

1. Nashville (1975) makes me want to make dramatic, perhaps even ridiculous statements, like "it contains everything great that the cinema is capable of producing!" But, you know, it might not be such a ridiculous statement. I gave it 473 goats after I saw it, and I stand by that rating.

Beautiful Losers: I watched so many great films at home or in revival houses that I had to ditch a whole heap of 4.5-goat films, and let me tell you, it hurt to cut these from my list, like cutting off a finger. (Since I had to cut sixteen of them, I finished off the fingers and started on the toes. I'm typing this with my elbows.) Each one of them is in my top ten films for its respective year. In alphabetical order: Ballad of a Soldier (USSR, 1959), Force of Evil (1948), Holiday (1938), Imitation of Life (1934), Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), The Long Day's Dying (1968), Movie Crazy (1932), Odd Man Out (1947), One Way Passage (1932) (this one hurt the worst), Playtime (France, 1967), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), The Southerner (1945), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), Sunday at Six (Romania, 1965), Tess (1980), and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

This might be the extent of my awards-giving this season, since I saw so few films in the theater that I don't feel comfortable naming any of them "the best." We'll see how I do playing catch-up in the next few weeks, but things are heating up over at CIMMfest, so I might not have much time for non-festival movie watching.

Alphabet Meme: Reality Edition

It just so happens that the fantasy world of the recent Alphabet Meme intersected with the reality world of a certain bank-owned revival house in a certain large Midwestern city. Without further preface, here's Hollywood A to Z, coming in January to a theater near you, if you happen live near that particular theater. (Titles preceded by ??? are not confirmed yet.)

January 3: The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937). McCarey's other 1937 masterpiece.
January 10: Black Book (Anthony Mann, 1949). Noir's master takes on the French Revolution.
January 17: Claudia (Edmund Goulding, 1943). Dorothy McGuire down on the farm.
January 24: Dames (Ray Enright & Busby Berkeley, 1934). Early 1930s Berkeley; nothing else to say.
January 31: ???Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954). Boardroom intrigue, and Barbara Stanwyck.
February 7: The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1948). Was Gary Cooper what Ayn Rand had in mind?
February 14: The Goddess (John Cromwell, 1958). Stage legend Kim Stanley as Monroe, or Gardner, or something.
February 21: Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, 1949). Hollywood takes on racism in the military.
February 28: I Can Get It for You Wholesale (Michael Gordon, 1951). Project Runway had to start somewhere.
March 7: ???Jericho (Thorton Freeland, 1937). Paul Robeson escapes to the desert after committing murder.
March 14: Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1946). Bogie as a defense attorney from the streets.
March 21: Lydia Bailey (Jean Negulesco, 1952). Romantic intrigue during the Haitian revolution.
March 28: My Sister Eileen (Alexander Hall, 1942). Earlier, nonmusical version of the story.
April 4: A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935). The Marx Brothers in a stateroom.
April 11: One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando, 1961). Brando at his most self-indulgent. Or maybe that's an overstatement.
April 18: ???Possessed (Clarence Brown, 1931). Joan Crawford as a kept woman; not to be confused with the 1947 film of the same name.
April 25: Queen Kelly (Erich von Stroheim, 1929). Gloria Swanson at her most self-indulgent. Probably not an overstatement.
May 2: Reveille with Beverly (Charles Barton, 1943). Basie, Sinatra, Ellington, the Mills Brothers, and Ann Miller.
May 9: Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter, 1933). Laurel and Hardy's best?
May 16: Tobacco Road (John Ford, 1941). I really hated Caldwell's novel, but I really like John Ford.
May 23: The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944). Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey in a haunted mansion.
May 30: Verboten! (Samuel Fuller, 1959). Postwar romantic intrigue, via one of cinema's most interesting directors.
June 6: ???A Woman's Face (1941). I have it on good authority that the first two-thirds are worth the price of admission.
June 13: X-The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963). There really aren't a lot of movies that start with X. But this is perfect.
June 20: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). I already said how much I love Cagney, and Cagney in this film.
June 27: Zoo in Budapest (1933). Will Loretta Young continue to surprise me?

Alphabet Meme

The Rules

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. ... In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

OK, I had a list almost done, then I put my computer to sleep, and when it woke up it had restarted. Of course I saved all my hard work I decided I wasn't that into it anyway, so no big deal. But then Self-Styled Siren tagged me, so I had to do it again because she's awesome.

A couple rule changes/modifications/local variations: first, although I might not aspire to be King of Google, I am king of this blog, so I'm using either the English or the original language title of films depending on where I want them to fit. Honestly, I'm typing this before I do my list, so it might not even come into play. Second, just because I'm perverse and want to make things hard on myself, I can't use the first film I think of for a given letter. (Editor's note: I came to regret this around the letter H.) Third, with one exception, I'm not using any films made after 1990 because older films trip more readily off my tongue. Fourth, I found most of these my scanning my top ten lists for each year, because that was easier than the alternative, which was to never finish this post. So, without further blather:

After Death (1915) Affecting early Russian melodrama of guilt.
Brighton Rock (1947) Richard Attenborogh is the scariest thug in southern England.
Craig's Wife (1936) Brilliant multilayered study of gender politics, and Ros Russell in top form.
Duminica la ora 6 (1965) (aka Sunday at Six) A Romanian film about love and paranoia during the fledgling socialist revolution, and the only place on this list where I feel a little guilty for being deliberately obscure.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958) Jeanne Moreau in the rain, Miles Davis, and the perfect crime spoiled.
Die Freudlose Gasse (1925) (aka The Joyless Street) Dark, full of despair, censored to ribbons, and Garbo's big break.
Gabriel Over the White House (1933) Bizarre, scary fantasy from the depths of the Depression.
Hardware (1990) If you think it's just a ripoff of The Terminator, well, you're only half right.
I'm All Right Jack (1959) Brilliant British satire of labor-management relations.
Judge Priest (1934) Utterly objectionably racist, but one of the best portraits of small-town life.
Koroshi no rakuin (1967) (aka Branded to Kill) Seijun Suzuki's manic, incoherent satire of honor among assassins.
The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra (1928) One of the earliest and best films about dehumanization at the hands of the film industry.
Man's Castle (1933) Simply sublime. Plus, one of two or three films where I like Loretta Young.
The Narrow Margin (1952) The best film that takes place on a train.
One Way Passage (1932) One of the most romantic films of all time. I need a hankie.
Perfumed Nightmare (1977) Still the only Filipino film I've ever seen, a hilarious satire on the worship of the West
Queen Christina (1933) Because you can't ever have too much Garbo in a list. Plus, that hotel room scene with Gilbert.
Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979) The greatest standup act ever.
Stroszek (1977) Herzog's tragicomic, loveable mess treads a delicate balance between satire and adoration.
Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) The gruesomely funny mother of the slasher genre.
Union Pacific (1939) Cecil B. DeMille's epic of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Voyna i mir (1968) (aka War and Peace) Seven-hour Soviet epic is like nothing else in the history of film.
The Wages of Fear (1953) The most straightforward suspsense film ever.
X2: X-Men United (2003) There really aren't many films that start with the letter X.
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) My favorite actor in his best performance. (I just now came to both of those conclusions.)
Zabriskie Point (1970) Antonioni's best film, if only because I generally don't like Antonioni.

I'm not tagging anyone because this was hard and I'm tired. If you haven't been tagged, consider yourself tagged.

Oscar Profiles: Maurice Chevalier in The Big Pond

Best Actor Nominee, 1930 (paired with The Love Parade)
Lost to George Arliss in Disraeli

I'd argue that Maurice Chevalier didn't have much in the way of acting talent: he had charm and a certain lasciviousness, a knowing leer and a good singing voice. However good he was in the string of Ernst Lubitsch-directed and -inspired musicals he made in the early 1930s was a direct result of how well the films tapped his limited talents. This lower-tier semi-musical, more a standard fish out of water comedy than a musical or a romance, doesn't play to any of his strengths, and thus his Best Actor nod is one of the big head-scratchers of early 1930s acting nominations (a period filled with head-scratchers). Chevalier needed a bit of disreputability in his scripts, and the only thing this one can muster is some half-hearted references to homosexuality. Everything here works against Chevalier's grain, and so he seems a tad lost, with little of the charm that he sometimes passed off as talent. Of course the film was paired with the far superior The Love Parade, as nominations often were in the first few years of Oscar, so it's a bit more understandable to see his name among the luminaries of the category. But just a little bit. Performance rating: 2 goats

Oscar Profiles: Charles Coburn in The Devil and Miss Jones

Best Supporting Actor nomination, 1941
Lost to Donald Crisp in How Green Was My Valley

Although I'm still choking a little on some massive category fraud—Charles Coburn is the lead in this film, not a supporting player by any measure—and although it might be that this is just another case of Coburn being rewarded for doing the exact same thing over and over—three Oscar nominations for playing essentially the same gruff curmudgeon—I loved this film, and I loved Charles Coburn in it. He gives one of his three best performances (the others coming in The Lady Eve and Heaven Can Wait) as John P. Merrick, a reclusive plutocrat who decides to ferret out the union organizers in one of his department stores by posing as a shoe clerk and infiltrating their ranks. Of course he starts out as a bumbler, demonstrating how his wealth has insulated him from having to learn any useful skills, and of course he initially distrusts and then grows fond of the rabble-rousers, among them Jean Arthur, Robert Cummings, and a surprisingly attractive Spring Byington. It's hard to nail down exactly what makes him so good here, but I think Sam Wood's sprightly direction is the reason; maybe Coburn dependably brings the same raw materials to a role—that patrician voice coupled with the vaguely ridiculous carriage and face, that impeccable comic timing, and that grandfatherly warmth bubbling beneath the surface—but only sometimes does the right director allow or convince him to put his talents to such good use. He shows off a knack for physical comedy in a hilarious shoe-fitting battle with a recalcitrant tween, hefty doses of his patented gloweringly funny anger in any number of scenes, and a touching softness, especially in his scenes with Byington. Yes, it's the same Charles Coburn schtick that we've grown so used to, but the success of this movie depended on the perfect deployment of that schtick. Performance rating: 4 goats

Oscar Profiles: Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Best Actress winner 1933

"I know I speak so nondescriptly," Eva Lovelace says at one point, which caused me to chortle, because in this early-career, first-Oscar performance, Katharine Hepburn could have benefitted from a little more nondescriptness. She's a naive, fledgling actress from Vermont trying to make it big on Broadway by the most direct route, first camping out in producer Adolphe Menjou's office and later embarrassing herself at a dinner party with drunken takes on Hamlet and Juliet. Hepburn's trademark staccato delivery is too mechanical here, and where the part needed a bit of softness and warmth, her machine-gun technique comes across as brittle and clinically cold. The script doesn't help her out a whit, eliding her big understudy-makes-good stage triumph, perhaps out of a sense of economy (although the slim 74-minute running time could actually do with some padding), but more likely because this unformed Hepburn wouldn't be able to live up to the praise that the other characters shower on her. And her final, utterly confusing speech ("I'm not afraid! I'm not afraid!" afraid of what?)—well, nobody could have pulled that off convincingly, because it doesn't make any damn sense. Hepburn's not terrible here—she uses her scatterbrained mannerisms well in a speech about the exact circumstances of her future death, and at least she's fully committed to the painfully embarrassing party scene—but she didn't deserve the Oscar, which she won because the competition was so lax. There were fine, even timelessly great performances by women in 1933, including Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Loretta Young in Man's Castle, and even Hepburn's genuine triumph in Little Women, but Oscar picked a particularly undistinguished trio, with May Robson in Lady for a Day and Diana Wynyard in the dreadful Cavalcade filling the rest of the dance card. Performance rating: 2.5 goats

Oscar Profiles: Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth

Best Actress nomination, 1962
Lost to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker

Geraldine Page's sodden, washed-up actress crawls into Sweet Bird of Youth through a sludge of booze, pills, and self-pity before spreading her tattered but still lily-white wings into the kind of grotesque diva only Tennessee Williams could concoct. While escaping from a blown comeback film, she drugged herself into the arms of scheming gigolo Paul Newman, who's now trying to parlay his manipulation of her addled affections into a shot at Hollywood stardom. Page reels through the film like an emotional bumper car, alternately needy, savage, full of self-pity and eager to dig her claws into someone other than herself. She demonstrates an almost supernatural gift of changing the entire feeling of a scene, a line, or a closeup with a pregnant pause, an evaluating squint, an unexpected emphasis; she never lets us know exactly how in control she is at any given moment. If she convinces us that she's the kind of person a pretty-boy empty-head like Newman's Chance Wayne can manipulate, it's only a part of her self- and other-destructive game, because it's clear, once she dries out, that Newman is no match for her. The highlight of the role is a big speech, delivered after she's menaced by Rip Torn's redneck papa's boy, about how she is finally able to feel something for someone other than herself. It's such a great, sad, and hilarious insight into her character. It's mostly self-serving, fulsome praise about how great this new aspect of her personality is, but Page allows some room around the edges of the self-obsession for some genuine, touching affection and care for Newman, even if it is only a brief instance of her deigning to let her own internal spotlight cast more than a shadow on another person. I shouldn't overstate her self-sufficiency, because she is a wreck when she has to come into contact with people she can't control, but in the stagey confines of the hotel suite she shares with Newman, she's queen even when she's barely conscious. The only implausibility in the character—built into the script but exacerbated by Page's near-brilliant performance—is that this particular diva could ever go three months without searching for her own name in the entertainment pages, the gossip columns, or perhaps the police blotter. Performance rating: 4.5 goats

Oscar Profiles: Bette Davis in Dangerous

Best Actress winner 1935

It's kind of hilarious that in Bette Davis's first major film after the Of Human Bondage debacle—everyone thought she should have been nominated, especially Bette Davis, but she was snubbed and even a write-in campaign didn't remedy that fact—she's playing the greatest actress in the world, a woman placed in the elite company of the doomed genius Jeanne Eagels, and no one else. Sure, she's washed up, but there's brilliance underneath if only it can escape from the "jinx" surrounding her, and her own manipulative nature. If the bit about how great she is sounds like a bit of ego-stroking, well, it probably is. In fact, it's impossible to see Dangerous as anything but a series of apologies to Davis: from her studio head, Jack Warner, for sticking her in mostly undistinguished programmers and then failing to campaign for that Oscar; and from Oscar itself, for the snub (although Claudette Colbert deserved the award more anyway, but that's another story). So this the first and perhaps most obvious "apology Oscars," where the Academy makes up for earlier snubs. Standing on its own... well, Dangerous can't stand on its own. It's undistinguished claptrap, and Davis's performance doesn't do much to raise it above that level. Davis was reportedly unappeased by the nomination because she didn't want to be honored for lesser work, and she's right: this is lesser work. She hardly deviates from the shrill opening in which she attempts to play Juliet in a dive bar while staggering under the weight of gallons of gin, but at least later scenes allow her to ditch the painful drunk act. But there's really nowhere to go with this character: I'll admit that the internal "something" she's supposed to possess, according to other characters, actually exists, but that's because she's Bette Davis, and even this crap script can't smother that. Performance rating: 2.5 goats

You Can't Take It with You When the Boat Sinks

MIKE: The 11th episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In takes us sailing through treacherous waters, filled with icebergs and taxmen, animated eyebrows and accidental explosions, and (I'm guessing) finally some serious disagreement among our panel members. In 1938, four years after It Happened One Night, Best Picture went to another Frank Capra film, You Can't Take It With You, the overly madcap tale of love in the midst of Capra's traditional battle between free spirits and hidebound plutocrats. In 1997, maritime disaster struck when Titanic, the fraught tale of love aboard the world's largest metaphor raked in a kadillion dollars and won a kadillion Oscars, including Best Picture.

Both films are focused on inter-class love stories, in each case threatened by interference from one-dimensional rich people who treat the poor like dirt. In Titanic, Billy Zane, with the help of his sentient eyebrows and his man Friday, is willing to risk his own life and fortune to punish his fiancee (Kate Winslet) for cuckolding him with someone from steerage (Leonardo DiCaprio); in YCTIWY, heartless businessman Edward Arnold attempts to steamroll the eccentric Vanderhof/Sycamore clan (Lionel Barrymore et al.), who stand in the way of his plans for world domination or something. Both films present pretty simplistic pictures of class relations, one in the service of social satire, the other in the service of melodrama; does one or the other strike you as either more objectionable or more believable? What might Frank Capra and James Cameron have to say to each other about American society?

Or, we could talk about Titanic's, um, screenplay.

NATHANIEL: You know, when I put Titanic into my player I accidentally activated the closed captioning. Almost immediately I'm seeing Bill Paxton spelunking for treasure in the cavernous buried ship during the 20 minute prologue. He's got all of these deep sea cameras and gadgets and the subtitles kept saying "[mechanical whirring]". I found myself meta-giggling. Doesn't that describe James Cameron's plot, character arcs and dialogue more to a T? This movie is a machine, a gargantuan whirring chugging multi-geared behemoth. It might not be as sentient as Zane's eyebrows (good god but that performance is a stinker!) but Titanic is closer to a WALL•E than a Transformer—don't let the size fool you. The feelings may be expressed awkwardly but the machine has soul.

In other words... if you're looking for someone who hates Titanic you'll have to look elsewhere. I'm sitting there watching it and I'm thinking... "why on Earth do you love this?" After all, the dialogue is pitched to kindergarten level, the performances are clumsy (sorry Kate) if not outright awful (Billy Zane), plus it's super long and I'm (generally) impatient. I answer myself with a shrug and a 'go away' and I get lost in it. I saw it three times in the theater. By the time Rose gets that closeup after reading Jack's notes to "make it count" or "carpe diem" or somesuch, I have essentially forgotten that the boat is going to sink.

But yes it does annoyingly pander to the uneducated masses in terms of its "boo! hiss!!!" views of the upper crust. That crosscut to all of the men in the parlor room smoking and having mind numbing conversations juxtaposed into the middle of Jack's lively rowdy courting of Rose in steerage is particularly embarrassing. It's a stacked deck (no pun intended). But I'd argue that Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You is less simplistic or at least not too hateful of folks with big bank. Capra wants the very rich to be happy, too. He just doesn't think that they are.

MIKE: It occurs to me that now is a good time to state my problems with Titanic, as an unpleasant interlude between you two enthusiasts. I agree with most of what you said, Nathaniel, except the part where you love it and I don't. The dialogue is truly, mind-bogglingly horrendous at times, the performances range from barely adequate to cringe-worthy (although I actually like Winslet here, and, um... Billy Zane shares one of the few well-acted scenes before the iceberg, when he yells about how he basically owns Winslet, although he's generally a Silly Symphony-level bad guy), and even the much-lauded visual effects looked pretty chintzy to me—the comical Nerf-berg, the worse-than-rear-projection "look at me hanging over footage of icy water!" scenes, the visible line in long shots between the boat effects and the sky effects. Yes, I will admit that once the boat starts sinking, Cameron's peerless instincts for directing action kick in, and the last half is an utterly captivating, super-duper thrill ride, even despite some of the really stupid plot machinations ("I am rich and love only myself, but I will forgo a chance to save myself so I can chase you around this boat! And my evil hired man is also going to risk his life for me!"). But that awful, awful, awful first half drags the rest of the film down like a solid steel life preserver, and I can't forgive a three-hour-plus movie for being half dead weight.

NICK: It's so weird, because even when we disagree, we agree: I would concur with everything Mike says here, except the part where he dislikes Titanic, because I love it. I'll grant that a lot of the rear-projection scenes are Reptilicus-quality, with the caveat that most of them looked better on the silver screen. Winslet has an awful time relating to an upper-crust character, and it's interesting that she hasn't really tried it since—surely the only English actor of note who can make that claim for a ten-year period amid a thriving career? DiCaprio is abrasive, Gloria Stuart barely pushes, and even Kathy Bates seems pretty adrift (sorry) playing a kind of whiteface Hattie McDaniel. This has got to be the only movie I can think of where Frances Fisher sort of walks off with the acting laurels, if only for that persuasively distressed, truly creepy "Do you want to see me working as a seamstress? Is that what you want?"

I'm sure I've been too indulgent of Titanic in the past and am probably still too indulgent of it, but I'm sticking to my old argument that romantic cliché is the only right way to go with this story. Repulsive as this episode was for the people who died this way, it's such a minor event compared to the cultural currency that's accrued around it: it's a romantic cliché in and of itself, like the Alamo, or the golden-hearted hooker, or reaching across the aisle. That's why it sat so awfully when Jim Cameron wanted a moment of silence at the Oscars for the people who died. (Well, that plus he didn't ask for it till the second time he made it to the podium.) By this point, it's a pop calamity more than a real one. Thousands of simultaneous deaths is clearly nothing to sniffle at, and our global fascination with the tale is allegorical in fairly obvious ways that Cameron drives home and home again, but it's also in some ways deeply unserious. I'm not saying that these particular clichés always work. Bill Paxton saying "I never let it in!" while dry-crying is as kitsch as kitsch gets. But they're somehow of a piece with this material. And there's plenty of earnest horror elsewhere in the picture.

Plus, aside from a cheesy preoccupation with Really! Huge! Hats!, the film looks smashing. And it uses film space and the architecture of the ship as foundational elements in building suspense as well as emotion. And if we're underestimating how much those things matter, just look at You Can't Take It with You. Even if you haven't seen other, better Capra films or other, better films from 1938, simply looking at You Can't Take It with You feels like looking at Jan Brady. Not pretty, not cute. Fine, but unmistakably dullsville.

NATHANIEL: Unmistakably dull? Even when Jimmy & Jean spend most of the picture all believably googoo eyed for each other? Even though the silliness is undergirded with genuine sociopolitical ideology? Even with the great Ann Miller playing a bad dancer—though maybe you're right as that hilarious-in-concept bit isn't all that funny in repetitive execution. It's certainly not funny like it could be. Like Julianne Moore as bad actress Amber Waves comedy.

But speaking of actresses in over their heads, I think Nick has nailed what's wrong with Kate in Titanic but my earlier "clumsy" and clumsier comment doesn't give Winslet credit for what she does bring to the picture. Titanic works best as pop cinema (once the action gets going and as Nick perceptively states within the realm of cliché) and what I've always found fascinating about our English Rose is that her face is a remarkable vessel for distilled emotion. There's such pure cinema in it. And in key closeups in this movie, specifically when she isn't speaking, Winslet's a force as elemental as the water that's going to kill thousands. She slays me.

Which brings me to another point in favor of Titanic. In some ways the two dimensional characters are an ideal setup for the horror of the film's second half. I'm willing to forgive these two callow kids (and the actors playing them) anything once they're half frozen and doomed. Their youth comes into such sharp focus just when their performances do. The enormity of what's being stolen from them jerks the tears.

NICK: ...whereas the reverse is sort of true for me in You Can't Take It with You. That is, Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur feel more comfortable in these roles—possibly too comfortable?—than Leo and Kate are in theirs, but I have virtually no investment in their winding up together during the long, cacophonous end of the story. Edward Arnold's not-quite-believable but still engaging change of heart is more of a hook for me through that finale. I also like studying Lionel Barrymore for those moments when he suddenly looks like he's feeling BAD for surrounding his granddaughter with so many kooks and maladjustees. But Jimmy and Jean? I feel huge affection, but it's all imported from other roles. And they're not tied into my favorite aspects of You Can't Take It with You, which are all the bustling crowds and a few of the deep-space shots where various Vanderhofs and Sycamores are making various forms of mischief in foregrounds, middle-grounds, and backgrounds. (Though even some of these are embarrassing: Ed just standing over a marimba for minutes on end, miming that he's playing without really doing it, etc.)

Maybe it would help if Jimmy or Jean EVER looked so suffused with emotion and sudden, solemn conviction as Kate does when she's being pulleyed down in a lifeboat, but then hops back onto the big, sinking ship. This is always, always, ALWAYS when I enjoy my massive, snivelly, hiccuping bawl. Pity me if you must.

MIKE: Again, I can't find much fault with anything you two said in favor of Titanic, except that you like it and I don't. And I admit that I do get misty-eyed when Popsicle Leo sinks. I guess we'll have to save strenuous, "what kind of person are you?" disagreement for later.

Changing gears to YCTIWY, this feels like one of the oddest Best Picture winners in history. To elaborate (probably unnecessarily) on what Nick said, it's not great Capra comedy (they nailed that back in '34 with It Happened One Night), it's not great Capra politics (surely a fuzzier, less strident but also less cohesive political statement than, say, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or any number of Capracorn films that followed), it's not great for 1938 (although among the nine other nominees, the only one that screams Best Picture is Renoir's amazing The Grand Illusion)... it was basically a lot of energy and noise expended to no significant effect. I can't hate it, or even dislike it, but it's a trifle. I like things around the periphery quite a bit: the folks in the basement, the sight of Mischa Auer springing into his dance, Spring Byington's amusing distractedness. But overall it feels like a rest stop between funny Capra and crusading Capra. It is interesting that it's not as unforgiving of opposition as his films sometimes got—there's room for the rich in Grandpa Vanderhof's happy household, whereas there's no room for compromisers in Mr. Smith's version of Washington.

NATHANIEL: I'm so glad you're here to provide context. I really am. [Note to self: Must see all Best Picture nominees as Mike has done—What an achievement!] You Can't Take It With You IS an odd example of a winner. There's no size. There's quite a bit of silliness. But I love that in these first 11 episodes of the series we've seen that the Academy has been trying different personas on for size. Eventually they settle into their somewhat predictable Sober/Epic/Important groove but the first decade is kind of all over the place and I love it for that.

If you anthropomorphize AMPAS the institution into a cast member of You Can't Take It With You it's like this: Eventually Oscar becomes Lionel Barrymore's platitude friendly Grandpa Vanderhof (patriarchal, speechifying, big-hearted) but in the 30s Oscar was totally Spring Byington's busybee Mama Sycamore. She's always buzzing about from one identity the next. She paints for a while. She becomes a writer as soon as a typewriter lands on her desk. She'd become a vet next if a sick animal stumbled through the door. Oscar's persona is just as fluid and flighty early on. Anyway the wind blows...

How about you, longsuffering readers: Does Titanic sink or swim? Is You Can't Take It with You prime Capracorn, or does it seem a bit stale?

Previously: #10: The Life of Emile Zola and Shakespeare in Love, #9: The Great Ziegfeld and American Beauty, #8: Mutiny on the Bounty and Gladiator, #7: It Happened One Night and A Beautiful Mind, #6: Cavalcade and Chicago, #5: Grand Hotel and LOTR: ROTK, #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men

Oscar Profiles: Edmund Gwenn in Mister 880 (1950)

Best Supporting Actor nomination 1950
Lost to George Sanders in All About Eve

Edmund Gwenn, in the title role of a kindly neighborhood junk collector and amateurish counterfeiter of $1 bills, comes across as a force of pure, if distracted, good, and although the result is a nice performance, it's not nearly as interesting as it could have been. Gwenn's "Skipper" Miller, known to the frustrated Secret Service as Mister 880, after the case number assigned to him, is a neighborhood saint, do-gooder, friend to children and animals, and only incidentally a criminal who makes obvious counterfeits on a home printing press (they're so bad that "Washington" is spelled "Wahsington"). Gwenn's decision to play every scene in the same friendly but absentminded manner provides one genuinely surprising moment, when Burt Lancaster (the star, a Secret Service agent assigned to the case) finally catches him: he acknowledges his crime and seems somewhat eager to get the prosecution over with, but there aren't any layers here. He comes across as a bit addled, if anything, in his eagerness to help the feds and his refusal to defend himself or avoid prison—"I'm sure there are a lot of nice people there," he says to the judge—but I'm not sure he was supposed to be addled. Honestly, it seemed like he was playing a Santa Claus who happened to make funny money. Walter Huston was chosen to play Mr. 880 but died before filming began, and I can only wish that he had survived long enough to give this role some real conflict, a sense that Skipper gets some devilish enjoyment out of passing bad counterfeits, a hint that something more than near-sainthood or senility was driving his eagerness to be punished.

Previous Oscar-nominated performance profiles: Diane Lane, Maggie McNamara, Jane Alexander, and Eleanor Parker

The End

At 11:54 pm, I finished watching Gone with the Wind, my 459th and final Best Picture nominee. (As far as I know, The Patriot is still lost, and will remain so.) Although I didn't exactly save the best for last—I did love parts, and liked it quite a bit overall—it was a fitting end, and at least now there will be no more outraged looks when I admit that I haven't seen it.

Next up: Best Director. Only 43 to go!

Zola in Love

The 11th episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In is up chez Nathaniel. Our merry band is looking at two films about writers; they serve as good examples of how (Shakespeare in Love) and how not (The Life of Emile Zola) to explore the writing life on celluloid. I was hoping to come up with a top ten films about writers, but I'm so swamped that all I really decided is that Shakespeare in Love will probably make the cut. Help me out: what are your favorite films about writers?

Mutiny in the Arena: Covered in Man-Sweat

MIKE, aka goatdog: Episode 8 of Best Pictures from the Outside In brings us two big hunks of manly, epic action. There was so much testosterone flying through the air that I almost felt compelled to grunt and scratch myself. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) is a solid action-drama featuring two titanic performances from Charles Laughton as the despicable tyrant Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as the noble Mr. Christian; they both received Oscar nominations along with Franchot Tone's composite Roger Byam. It has the kind of epic scope, larger-than-life performances, and special effects that gets Oscar salivating.

And then there's Gladiator (2000), which had me scratching my head. It has several of the same ingredients—representatives of pure good and pure evil (Russell Crowe's Maximus and Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus, respectively), an epic scope (from the wilds of Germany to the deserts of North Africa to the streets of Rome), and special effects. But to quote a friend, it's like they threw eggs and milk and flour onto a table and called it cake. Aside from Crowe's Oscar-winning performance, nobody really impressed me, Phoenix least of all. The much-lauded battle scenes were unwatchably shot and edited (fast! slow! fast! jittery! slow!), the Oscar-winning visual effects looked like the crowd scenes in a Sega Genesis game, and the screenplay distilled a lot of potentially interesting issues down into unimaginative talking points.

So we have two! big! films! that feature pitched battles between utter good and utter evil—or does the sequence where Bligh guides his loyal crewmembers across 3500 miles of ocean in a teacup provide Laughton with a bit of three-dimensionality that Phoenix's Commodus lacks? How does Mutiny's shot-on-location ethos, supplanted by some judicious use of rear-projection, stack up against Gladiator's cartoon Colloseum? And, most importantly, did you grunt and/or scratch yourself during either of these films? Be honest: you're among friends.

NICK: Hold on—I have to finish watching The Game and polish off some more Michelob and bring my voice down a few scales before I'm ready to talk about this.

At which point, I'll be agreeing with virtually everything you just said. Though I will also add that the visual and narrative economy of Mutiny on the Bounty, keeping over a dozen recognizable characters in play and following three major protagonists without the pace flagging or the story losing its balance, shows that Frank Lloyd was a lot more proficient at captaining this ship than he was the S.S. Cavalcade two installments ago.

I may also let on that Franchot Tone's might be my favorite of three very good lead performances in Mutiny (all of them Oscar-nominated) and that I think Crowe is phenomenally good in the chintzy, continually disappointing Gladiator. Beyond holding the film together against heavy odds, he actually sold Maximus to me as a character instead of a plaster-cast of generic clichés. Though his remarkable, charismatic earnestness only makes the rest of Gladiator look more and more like a moderately diverting coloring book about Roman Times.

But like I said, I won't be prepped to delve into any of this before I've finished updating my Fantasy Football roster and eating the rest of my Manwich.

NATHANIEL: Nobody told me there was a coloring book!? I suddenly like Gladiator so much better. Even if it the crayons are only in blue (mood lighting), sepia (sand... and oldey times!), and red (real men do bleed).

I kid. You know what's weird? I actually liked Gladiator much better this time than I did in 2000 when I was horrified that it beat up on Crouching Brockovich and Hidden Wuxia. At the very least I'd forgotten that Crowe is really strong in it (though that Oscar is still a stretch) and that Ridley Scott always can be counted on for at least a few sharp or memorable visuals. I loved that plasterhead of Caesar behind Commodus (boo hiss—to both character and performance sadly) and that fakey CGI collisseum is easier for me to swallow in a way since there's that great shot of the same building preceding the f/x games where suddenly Commodus is in frame, placing little dollies... excuse me figurines into the center. To quote Monty Python's Holy Grail... "It's only a model"

The same could be said of Connie Nielsen. She's really only there for demographic quadrant reasons. She's not organic to the material at all. I generally appreciate backstory intrigues that aren't fully shared with the audience but her previous relationship to Maximus is so vaguely drawn that I just didn't care.

The romances in Mutiny on the Bounty are easier to buy, partly becaue they're not meant to be taken as seriously. They're romps in the grass, summer flings... they just happen to come with marriage and babies due to unpredictable forces of nature (i.e. Bligh vs. Christian)

But again... it's all about the men. Even the love stories. Gladiator's love triangle romance is totally between Maximus and Marcus Aureulius (oh Daddy!) with Commodus being the (wo)man scorned. and Mutiny's is totally all about Christian & Byam with Laughton not invited to the nuptials. Bless Frank Lloyd for even giving Gable & Tone a post-coital shot lying pleasantly in the grass—admittedly their women are just out of frame but still... they're brothers in arms and nearly in each others.

MIKE: I'm glad you brought up Connie Nielsen, Nathaniel. I'm still somewhat confused by the film's treatment of her. We get a solid hour of muttering and insinuation about how she's a super-schemer, completely untrustworthy and the most dangerous dame in town, but it seems all she does is frown and cry. Her big speech at the end seems both out of nowhere and completely redundant.

In fact, that whole scene... all right, I know movies aren't history lessons, and if you expect good history from Hollywood you deserve what you get (which is usually a pie in the face), but I was still surprised that Scott and company hijacked history so much in the service of their vaguely pro-democracy and ant-tyrant message. The historian in me is much happier with Lloyd's seafaring epic, which hews pretty closely to history, at least history as modified by literature—aside from importing Nordhoff and Hall's fictional creation Byam and upping Bligh's air of supernatural evil by having him recapture Byam, they provide a pretty solid little history lesson. Oscar loves a historical epic, and sometimes he loves facts, but, well, does any of this matter to you guys?

NICK: Let's say that it bothers me when the history doesn't even feel true. An emperor getting into the ring to fight a prisoner, just to prove a point? And in a disgusting eggnog-colored outfit, to boot, that makes him look like a pupating insect? Not just historically insane (from the very little I would even know), but afoul of every reason of absolute power for which Commodus wants to be emperor. He'll kill his own father but won't "make a martyr" of Maximus?

MIKE: The weird thing is that Commodus DID get in the ring, decked out as Hercules, which maybe explains the buggy costume—one of Hercules's less famous adventures, of course. But when he fought, it was only for show, against people who would submit to him. But the only "point" he was proving was that he was colossally egotistical.

NICK: What really bothers me about the social context in Gladiator, though, is its incessant chatting about "the mob" without getting close to it, ever, and the extreme condescension it voices about pop crowds (bloodthirsty, mindless) while being so hell-bent on flattering the film's own audience that "the mob" never makes a wrong move. As much as we hear that they are cosmically depraved, etc., they instinctually hate Commodus, who is furnishing them with all this spectacle that they love (hate?), and they cheer for Maximus even when he berates them. Filmmakers: MAKE UP YOUR MIND. Take a risk and smack your audience for our own bloodthirstiness ("Are we not entertained" by those grisly sequences in the ring?) or shut up with your vague moral judgments that you're unwilling to dramatize.

About Connie Nielsen: if you scoot really close to her, does that tattoo between her eyebrows read "we tried so hard to get Monica Bellucci"?

NATHANIEL: While we're scooting close to the screen, did I actually catch side boob and nipplage on the Tahitian honeys in Mutiny on the Bounty? I hate to be so juvenile but I dug all the explicitly implied (?) sex of Mutiny on the Bounty. Are we still Pre-Code Hollywood or did Frank Lloyd get away with it because he's lensing the "natives" ... and that doesn't count as real nudity. At least it doesn't in conservative American homes of the 1970s with subscriptions to National Geographic.

Oops... We left Rome & Tahiti for Michigan and my childhood! My apologies. Back to the topics at hand: How strange is it that we've had two Clark Gables up against two Russell Crowes, two huge alpha males in the Hollywood firmanent. Preferences? Thoughts?

NICK: Mutiny could have started production before the passing of the code, but it certainly opened later. The National Geographic factor is the clincher here: you can see the same stuff in Hawaii (1966), right before the parameters for screen nudity technically got widened. You know, for white people.

Speaking of white people: ever notice how weird Ridley Scott is around anyone BUT white people? He sold a great Aryan villain in Blade Runner, but he sure bungles Djimon Hounsou's "Juba" here, and Black Hawk Down is just around the corner...

And speaking of nudity: Russell Crowe. (What do you mean, he didn't do any?) What I love about the Gladiator/Beautiful Mind pair is that it shows how profoundly Crowe can shift gears: he's as compressed and direct here as he is fussy and "technical" as Nash. It's exactly this quality of simplicity that saves the movie for me, since, as we've already mentioned, it's always trying so frenetically to throw so much at the screen. Crowe is grounded and substantial, and his subtle shifts in expression (smoldering at injustice, adrenalized in the ring, visibly reminded of his grief, stunned and angered by the audience) suggest eddies of deep content in Gladiator that just aren't there. He's like a sexy, muscular Spencer Tracy, when the Spencer Tracy "let's play it low-key" thing actually works.

Gable, for me, repeats a neat trick in the Capra and Lloyd movies, starting out affable and getting testier and testier. I admit that I admired the performance more this time than the first time I saw it (at Goatdog's theater!), because it keeps Fletcher from being altogether admirable. Meanwhile, Laughton seizes some moments to make Bligh's desperation to be liked and his miserable self-pity quite naked. Tone has to be a bright, fresh-faced blank slate throughout and register every little wrinkle of experience that Christian and Bligh etch onto his face and his spirit throughout, so that he'll have some moral credibility at the end. I think he's quite marvelous at this, and I love the whole movie's resistance to superficial personalities.

ME: I agree that Scott does get a little weird around non-white people, although for the most part American Gangster didn't strike me that way. Maybe it's up to the actors to make their scenes work: for example, Ghassan Massoud, as Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven, stands out as one of the film's most interesting characters despite its weirdness about the Muslims.

I like Crowe better overall here than I did in A Beautiful Mind, but he doesn't achieve the heights of that film's last third, when his twitches coalesced into a fully realized personality. But the winner for me is still Gable in It Happened One Night (if only because I can't pick Claudette Colbert in that movie, since you asked about the men). What he does feels like more than just a "neat trick," although I agree that it's basically the same thing here and in IHON. He hints at tiny cracks in that affability in both films, but when they appear in IHON there's a surprising underlying viciousness that I didn't see as much here. If I had to pick one of the 1935 nominees, it would have been Laughton, mostly for what he does in that rowboat sequence when we realize what a capable captain he can be when he has something specific to concentrate on. And you have me almost convinced about Tone, who I've always thought of as a distant third in a race between Laughton and Gable, perhaps because as the composite everyman fly on the wall type guy, he has to carry too much of the burden of explaining things to the audience.

NATHANIEL: Maybe Ridley Scott should make a B&W picture so that extreme variance of skin tones don't distract him? I still shudder thinking about a few moments from Black Hawk Dawn. Yikes. Or perhaps he's just stronger if there's a limited palette. I mean you have to love all the pasty whiteness of the Hauer / Hannah scenes in Blade Runner and the twin sunburnt reds of Sarandon and Davis in Thelma & Louise.

I was actually so surprised at the late scenes when Bligh turns out to be a resourceful leader. Gladiator (and many other movies for that matter) would never muddy the waters to that degree. Could you imagine if Commodus had some late breaking scene where he reveals some hidden kindness or stealth wisdom? Even his affection for his nephew is viewed as sickly. He starts out nasty and he just gets keeps getting nastier. It's less a character arc than a freefall.

But back to Mutiny. I haven't seen the Marlon Brando version of this movie but I remember the 1984 Mel Gibson production as being far less balanced. You were basically on Team Mel the whole time. I was never really on Team Laughton but I wasn't always entirely with Team Christian and suddenly I was thinking Team Tone seemed pretty smart. I thank the movie for questioning my allegiances since that's, you know, what the story is about.

Whereas, I'm convinced that you could start Gladiator with the scene where Commodus kills his father, more than half an hour in, and the movie wouldn't miss a thing. In theory, we'd lose our sense of Maximus' battlefield prowess, but as Mike indicated earlier, that whole sequence is so terribly shot and edited that we don't understand that prowess anyway.

I don't want to sound like I'm overpraising Mutiny—it's a terrific achievement in workmanlike craftsmanship, but it doesn't really hit any Masterpiece notes. And I don't mean to short-sell how fun Gladiator can be when Scott captures the enervated energy or the life-or-death stakes inside that ring. I admit that I like the score a lot, too. But it still stands that there's almost nothing in Mutiny that I want to fix and almost nothing in Gladiator that I don't want to trim, tighten, deepen, or improve.

MIKE: Well, I think I speak for the rest of us when I say, "What he said."

What say you, readers? Gladiator is #125 on the IMDB's top 250 films; did we miss the boat on that one? Does Mutiny on the Bounty warm the cockles of your landlubbers' hearts?

Stats: Mutiny on the Bounty was nominated for eight Oscars (three lead actors, director, editing, screenplay, score) and won only Best Picture. Gladiator was nominated for twelve Oscars (supporting actor, art direction, director, cinematography, editing, score, original screenplay) and won five (picture, actor, costume design, visual effects, sound).

Previously: #7: It Happened One Night and A Beautiful Mind, #6: Cavalcade and Chicago, #5: Grand Hotel and LOTR: ROTK, #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men

The Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon

Welcome to the Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon HQ. Entries are already pouring in, and I'm looking forward to a torrent of great posts on movies about the movie industry's favorite subject—itself.

It's not quite the end yet, but I wanted to thank you all for helping make this THE GREATEST AND MOST SUCCESSFUL BLOG-A-THON EVER held here at goatdogblog. I'm really shocked (happily so) at how many of you participated, and I can't wait until the dust clears and I get a chance to read all of your entries.

The Participants (in approximate order of appearance):

• Noel Vera on the Filipino film Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof) (1998)
• Flickhead on the documentary A Decade Under the Influence (2003)
• Operator_99 on the ladies of The Falcon in Hollywood (1944)
• Yours truly on the Jean Harlow film Bombshell (1933)
• Oggs on the Filipino film Serbis (Service) (2008)
• Peter Nellhaus on H Story (Japan, 2001)
• J.D. at Radiator Heaven on Ed Wood (1994)
• C. Parker at Starlet Showcase on The Female Animal (1958)
• M. King chose this 'thon for his inaugural post, on Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (2008)
• Jacqueline at Another Old Movie Blog on Harold Lloyd's Movie Crazy (1932)
• Andrew at Gateway Cinephiles on Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001)
• James at Rants of a Diva on Truffaut's Day for Night (1973)
• Oggs is back with the Bollywood film Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)
• Michael at Patchwork Earth on Adaptation. (2002)
• Nick at Nick's Flick Picks on Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)
• Kevin Olson at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies on Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963)
• Thom at Film of the Year on Sunset Blvd. (1950)
• Tim at Antagony & Ecstasy on Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924)
• StinkyLulu on Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
• Marilyn at Ferdy on Films on Show People (1928)
• Bob at Forward to Yesterday on Blake Edwards's S.O.B. (1981)
• Self-Styled Siren on The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
• Alex at Motion Picture, It's Called on Welles's F for Fake (1974)
• Weeping Sam at The Listening Ear on King Kong (1933)
• Jose Sinclair at The World's Best Films on Altman's The Player (1992)
• Middento at When I Look Deep in Your Eyes on Cronenberg's short film Camera (2000)
• Stacia at She Blogged By Night on the infamous The Oscar (1966)
• MovieMan at The Dancing Image on Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Wear the White Dress Without the Brassiere

Hollywood attacks itself like a rabid dog gnawing on its own leg in Bombshell, a surprisingly vicious indictment of everything it stands for. It seems surprising for something so mean-spirited to have come so early in the Dream Factory's saga of self-loathing, and it's even more surprising because it seems so heartfelt. Bombshell passes itself off as a lightly satirical romantic comedy, but I don't think it believes this nonsense for a second, because the romance is all disguised manipulation, and the comedy is almost all bitter. Of course by displacing much of the evil onto a single character, string-pulling and fast-talking publicity man E.J. "Space" Hanlon (Lee Tracy), it protects the real bastards (studio heads, producers, etc.) from undue attention. But despite this shield of plausible deniability, it still serves up a pretty strong indictment of the virtual indentured servitude of contract players: famous actress Lola Burns (Jean Harlow) has no control over what parts she plays, no control over what the studio machinery decides is going to be written about her in the papers, literally no control over her own reality, a fact that's revealed to her when she decides to ditch it all and escape into the real world.

There's an incredible amount of overlap between reality and fiction. Harlow seems to be playing herself: her Lola is an actress typecast in raunchy comedies, known for her censorship-baiting costumes ("wear the white dress without the brassiere" is her wardrobe instruction one morning), who longs to be recognized for her acting chops instead of her bustline. They even call her "the If Girl," a nickname rich with the kind of delicious questions her male (and female) viewers must have asked every time she strode onscreen. Beyond that, though, this Lola happens to have recently costarred with Clark Gable in Red Dust, and her primary assignment at the beginning of this film is to do retakes of the infamous rain barrel bathing scene. Remove the "Lola" part, and it's like a documentary. There are other constant references to the real Hollywood, too: Lola mentions Gable's performance in Susan Lenox with Greta Garbo and later appreciates some romantic wooing by comparing it favorably to scenes in Norma Shearer and Helen Hayes films, and an assistant director waxes fondly about Tahiti by discussing his assignment on White Shadows in the South Seas. Throw in the rumor that the film was partly based on Harlow's own experiences in Hollywood, right down to her greedy father (played by Frank Morgan here), and tell me where exactly the line between reality and fiction falls. The film's title even ended up as the title of one of her biographies.

I'm guessing it's somewhere around the film's portrayal of Lola Burns, because I think (or would like to believe) Jean Harlow was probably a lot smarter and less shallow than her character, at whom a fair amount of the film's venom is directed. Sure, she's the victim of an unjust system that makes it quite impossible for her to live a normal life, but honestly, she doesn't seem quite capable of normalcy. From her designer sheepdogs to her designer European-Count boyfriend to the awful "mid-Atlantic" accent she adopts when she can't help being pretentious to her gold-plated phone (yes, the film is black and white, but the phone is so obvious that it had to have been intentional), Lola embodies the Hollywood artificiality she hates.

And it's here, when Harlow has to communicate this contradiction—basically, she wants to escape from something that she can't separate herself from—that I finally got her as an actress, as a sex symbol, and as a unique combination of the two. I have to admit that I've never really liked her or understood her appeal. She stinks up the room in The Public Enemy (honestly, what the hell is she doing in that movie?), and she's shrill and mostly unfunny in Platinum Blonde and Libeled Lady. I finally understood her sexiness in Red Dust, but Mary Astor blew her off the screen in that film, and the only time she'd convinced me as an actress was her delivery of a single line in China Seas. But I finally get her appeal. She's consistently funny: her near-constant high-pitched temper tantrums are a hoot instead of being grating, and her deluded attempts to behave like a normal human being are simply side-splitting. She's best in a couple of silent moments that had me laughing out loud. First, after she decides what she really needs to do is adopt a baby, the music swells on the soundtrack and she gazes reverently upward—at a velvet painting of a mare and foal!—selfishly unable to understand how horrible the empty chaos she inhabits would be for a child. And second, after a last-act romancing by the suave and wealthy Franchot Tone, she retires to her room for romantic daydreams, a trick she learned from Hollywood. She turns on the radio for the soft music that's supposed to be playing, and it doesn't register on her face for a moment that what comes out is ear-splitting jazz. It's a great comedic performance that provides a new delight in almost every scene. And she doesn't skimp on the drama, either: late in the film, after Hanlon's hijinks have driven her nearly insane, she's quite moving in her desire to get a little taste of reality, even if it means jettisoning her career.

If it were all Harlow, this would have been a really good movie, but it's also stocked with a number of supporting players, familiar faces and strangers, who nail every line in the excellent screenplay by Jules Furthman and John Lee Mahin. Una Merkel, always a delight as the squeaky-voiced, wise-cracking second female lead in countless films, plays Lola's scheming assistant Mac, who has a series of whip-smart exchanges with Louise Beavers, whose standard role as the maid is expanded here into someone who gets some of the film's best lines: "Don't scald me with your steam, woman—I knows where the bodies are buried!" And there must be so many bodies—perhaps soon to include Lola herself, the film implies with its odd ending, which states uncategorically that Lola's little bit of defiance did nothing except to convince her that defiance was utterly futile under the studio system. Unless your name is Bette Davis or Olivia de Havilland, I suppose.

CIMMfest

The brand spanking new Chicago International Movies and Music Festival (CIMMfest) is occurring next March 5-8 at the Chicago Cultural Center and other venues around town. It's the brainchild of Ilko Davidov, one of the owners of the film studio where I work, and Josh Chicoine of the Chicago band The M's. I'm the Programming Director. During the day and evening there will be film screenings, panel discussions, and workshops; at night there will be a series of concerts at clubs around the city. The City of Chicago is sponsoring it, and we're already taking submissions through Withoutabox.

You're saying, "Another film festival?" But this one is different, even aside from the concert series. The movies are all about music: how it's made, who makes it, what drives them to make it, how it shapes people's lives. They could be Don't Look Back-style documentaries, Almost Famous-style narratives, Stop Making Sense-style concert films, or anything that is about music, or uses music in an interesting way. Music videos, experimental shorts, musicals, mockumentaries, you name it—if it has a strong tie to music, we want to see it.

Silent Sunday: The Cat and the Canary (1927)

German director Paul Leni made only four films in Hollywood before he died of blood poisoning in 1929 at the age of 45: the lost Charlie Chan film The Chinese Parrot; The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning, both of which I really want to see; and this, one of the first "old dark house" mystery-thriller-comedies, which was based on a popular 1922 play and brought to the screen as an amazingly un-stagy, expressionistic, fast-moving whodunit that inspired, among other things, Scooby Doo.

It's not much of a horror film, being that it's not scary, but it is a beautiful work of art that demonstrates much of what made the late silents so great. Leni's camera is fluid and poetic, his shot setups are usually excellent, and the film makes great use of tinting, and even the usually momentum-killing intertitles are put to good use. It's all in the service of a pretty silly story, but the visual style is enough to make the film well worth watching.

Read the full review.

It Happened One Paranoid Delusion

In this, the seventh episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nathaniel, Nick, and I finally have some serious disagreements: is It Happened One Night absolutely perfect, or only nearly so? Can one really get enough of Claudette Colbert in this movie, or is her screen time sufficient? Are there enough pitch-perfect scenes, or should there have been one more? Readers, it's a surprise we didn't resort to physical violence to resolve these issues.

And then there's the whole issue of A Beautiful Mind, which also nearly resulted in tears: is it really bad, or just relentlessly average and anonymous? Do we care not a whit about the main characters' relationships, or is there a glimmer of something worth paying attention to? Is Ron Howard a boring, characterless director, or is he in fact devoid of a heart?

Head on over to Nathaniel's Film Experience Blog to discover just how close we were to tearing each other's hair out in this contentious discussion.

One of the problems with this series is that in the interest of not driving readers away with our blathering, we try to keep the entries somewhat short. This is a problem because I could go on all night about how wonderful It Happened One Night is, and how it gets better every time I see it. It's obviously the best screwball comedy ever made, and according to my own stupid, outdated Top 100 list, it's also the 13th best film ever made. That list needs lots of fixing, but this film's place is secure.

But calling it a screwball comedy seems to sell it short, because there's so much more to it than the madcap antics of its followers. It leaves those films (mostly) in the dust on the comedy side of things, but it also has more of a heart and more of a brain than most of them, a fact that's still surprising even after seeing it the third or fourth time. The scenes between Colbert and Walter Connolly (as her father) have become my favorites because they depict one of the most fully developed and complicated parent/adult child relationships I can remember seeing in a comedy. It's a shame the Best Supporting Actor category was still a couple years away, because Connolly would have been a lock.

Silent Sunday: Sunnyside (1919)

Charlie Chaplin's 1919 short Sunnyside is a highly weird little film, full of typical Little Tramp-tics and sight gags, but with a couple of digressions into fantasy and a completely inscrutable ending. One doesn't expect to leave a Chaplin film wondering if the Tramp kicked the bucket in the end (unless it involves a real bucket, of course), but here we are nonetheless.

The bulk of the film is what we expect from two- or three-reel Chaplin. He plays a farmhand who spends most of his time getting kicked in the butt by his employer; he also runs the desk at his boss's hotel, cooks all the food, and cares for the livestock. The best gags involve his attempts to save time by having the chicken lay her eggs in the frying pan and milking the cow directly into a coffee cup. He's in love with the neighbor's daughter (Edna Purviance)—a plot development so inevitable that it's announced by a title that reads "And now, the 'romance'." Two things complicate his wooing. First, after a run-in with a renegade bull, he's knocked unconscious, an interlude in which his spirit cavorts in a field with a troupe of faerie ballerinas. Soon after he wakes, a rich guy from the city arrives, gets into a car accident, then starts macking on Edna, who seems taken with the guy's spats. Charlie attempts, in his inimitable way, to imitate the wealthy heel, but when it fails, he tosses himself into the path of an oncoming car, and kablam! He's dead.

Or is he? There's a quick fade to the hotel, where his boss is kicking him awake; he's fallen asleep in a chair, and Charlie's suicide over Mr. Rich and Edna's romance was just a dream. Before leaving, Mr. Rich smiles at Edna, who spurns him, and she and Charlie waddle off happily. The end.

Except I don't buy it. The whole suicidal despair segment doesn't fit with the film's already-demonstrated dream world, which is much lighter in tone—remember the faeries. It seems like too much for a 30-minute film to make a bunch of "dream rules" and then break them. And Charlie's behavior and the gags he's involved in during the "second dream" are completely consistent with reality—there are no visitations, but he does attempt to make spats out of a pair of wool socks, resulting in hilarity.

Of course, if the suicide is real then what comes after is one of those Jacob's Ladder-style "at the moment of death" dreams, which isn't entirely satisfactory, but is at least novel. The suicide angle might seem a bit dark for a Chaplin film, but the other option is that the film is kind of sloppy and thrown together. I realize this was surely the case in many, many instances, and probably is the correct answer here, but I like my ending better.

Silent Sunday: Broken Blossoms (1919)

Is this a good place to admit that this is my first feature-length Griffith film? Probably not, but it's too late now. I've seen chunks of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, but I'd never really tackled the guy who basically invented the modern cinema. I'm a bad cinephile, but I'm working on that.

My first foray is into his depressing tale of a forbidden, interracial love between a Chinese man and a white woman. Of course, it's so understated that it's possible to read it as a completely unreciprocated love. Richard Barthelmess, a great, unjustly forgotten actor, is very good as "The Yellow Man," but the film belongs to Lillian Gish, who works her closeups with dazzling skill.

Read the full review.

Silent Sunday: Early Jesus

The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1902-1905) is one of the earliest feature-length films, although it's not much of a "film" by modern standards. It's a series of scenes, or tableaux, of the life of Jesus, from the Annunciation to the Ascension. Still and stodgy, the film provides some relief outside the obvious historical value: there's some really great tinting, along with some really impressive dissolves, masking, fading, and other early-cinema tricks that seem to belong more in a Georges Méliès film than in a dead-serious film about the Christ. (The best effect has to be when the baby Jesus appears—abracadabra!—in the manger, saving Mary the pain of labor.)

Read the full review.

It's available from Image Entertainment in a fabulous, meticulously restored, gorgeous DVD that retains much of Pathé's impeccable tinting and adds, for a bonus, another early Passion play, the 1912 film From the Manger to the Cross, which was shot on location in Palestine. The package is a model of attractive presentation and obvious love for the medium.

The Lord of the Hotel: The Return of the Concierge

MIKE: Only five Best Picture winners have won all the Oscars for which they were nominated, and we have two of them in this installment. In 1932, Grand Hotel became the only film to win Best Picture without winning, or even being nominated for, any other awards. It presents the intertwining tales of people living in various states of desperation at the finest hotel in Berlin: broke baron John Barrymore, dying bookkeeper Lionel Barrymore, stenographer (etc.) Joan Crawford, Prussian industrialist Wallace Beery, and depressive diva Greta Garbo. On the other end of the calendar is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, whose eleven-for-eleven tied it for the most Oscars ever. Shortly before its thirty-seven endings, epic battles occur, Gandalf (Ian McKellan) is wise, Gimli and Legolas (John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom) bond homosocially, Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood and Sean Astin) destroy the ring, and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) becomes king.

The two films present a perfect storm of nerdy Best Picture statistics trivia: only ten films have won the big prize without a single acting nomination, and these two are on that list as well. What's up with that? Grand Hotel presents a banquet of movie stars working at the top of their game; is it simply the lack of supporting categories and the limited space (three slots each) in the lead categories that caused its shutout? What do you think about these performances? And whereas great acting isn't the focus of the Lord of the Rings saga, does its lone nomination (Ian McKellan's for the first installment) give the series enough credit for its stars' acting chops? (Yeah, I know we're dealing with just this one film, but you'd have to be drunk on Louisiana Flips to think all those Oscars weren't for the entire series.)

NICK: See, that brings up a big point for me right away. Even if The Return of the King pitched that perfect Oscar game in part because AMPAS wanted to reward the whole trilogy, and even though principal photography was (famously) continuous on all three installments, I can't help thinking that The Return of the King is a stylistically different and frankly inferior picture to The Fellowship of the Ring. Not that it's a huge difference; I still like ROTK a lot, and it has plenty of the expressive color, the detailed designs and locations, the energy, the scale, and the emotional breadth that subtends the whole wonderful series. But I feel like ROTK gets stuck too often in these magnified close-ups of actors in frankly unimaginative frames, and the editing patterns don't keep all the fields of action and conflict as pristinely differentiated or as exciting as Fellowship did. (All three installments indeed boast different lead editors.) The serial and very protracted endings are a big problem for me in ROTK, and since you bring up acting, Mike, the emphasis on close-ups in ROTK, which should be even more actor-friendly, instead keeps emphasizing that some of the cast don't have the full control and technique that their roles require (Elijah Wood, John Noble) and others keep trying to screw their faces up and force out a convincing tear or two or twenty (Sean Astin especially, but also Billy Boyd). It's a tenser, fuller, more majestic movie than Two Towers, but I don't think it's the series apex that I coveted, or that Oscar commemorated, and I don't think it's as deserving a winner as Fellowship would have been.

Big pluses: That Gollum-centric opening is still a corker, and the lighting of the beacons is a reliable thrill. And Shelob. Big minus: "Shadowfax, show us the meaning of haste!" This won for screenplay?

NATHANIEL: But it didn't win for screenplay... the trilogy won. I'd go so far as to say that all of the LotR wins and nominations are based on the whole, projected (in the first two years) or existing (once Return was playing). It's hard to hold the Academy's attention—this isn't (usually) the EMMYs where you can phone it in once you're well liked—but generally once you've got awards momentum, you've won half the battle. Return of the King had three years of mass emotional investment propping it up even if it hadn't proved as satisfying as it did.

I'll beat a dead horse and agree that it stumbles with those multiple endings. Not because they're there (there are dozens of characters to bid farewell to you know) but because Jackson underlines their ending quality so much. Why the multiple fadeouts? What a weirdly misjudged repeat "gotcha!" that decision proved. It reminds me of that great line from The Age of Innocence: "Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it." Why toy with our natural desire to exit the theater after three plus hours of satiating thrills? I suspect that if you simply erased the fadeouts—maybe a cross dissolve instead?—there would've been less griping.

But let's stay positive. There's so much to love. In both movies I might add. Is it just me or is Joan Crawford, often disparagingly viewed as something of a Shelob herself, a total kick in the pants in Grand Hotel? She's my favorite part of the movie and I like most of its parts.

NICK: I agree, it's not just the quantity of endings in ROTK, but beyond their constant elegiac quality, it's the insistence on soothing beauty that puts me off at the end. After the highest-stakes global struggle imaginable, the world has no scars or stretch-marks, the light gleams, and the actors get pushed in all those closing scenes between ineffable sorrow and beatific grins, often on a dime. I really feel like the emotional AND the narrative threads get sacrificed to bland, reassuring spectacle in those conclusions.

But, as requested, I'll stop griping: and yes, Joan Crawford is amazing in Grand Hotel. Even as the other actors spin reliable or even engaging versions of the archetypes assigned to them, Joan is by far the craftiest at making Flaemmchen neither "good" nor "bad" and keeping us guessing about the character...despite keeping her playing style so simple and direct.

Grand Hotel has at least as many close-ups per minute as Return of the King, but to such a different purpose: you are practically watching the advent of 30s-era movie stardom as you watch Grand Hotel, as the camera extracts as much behavioral implication and palpable personality as it can just by doting on these scrupulously lit faces. The stars become an indispensable part of Art Deco style, sleek and cool and reflective. But they also capture enough of the longing and desperation built into the script that the movie doesn't feel completely weightless... and stardom itself is more interesting for its connotations of loneliness and unreality.

MIKE: I like what you said about the dawn of 30s-era stardom, Nick, and it fits with what went on offscreen—Garbo and Crawford fought over screen time, Garbo and Beery refused to sign until they got extravagant salaries, and Garbo seems to be willing to poke a little fun at her own superstardom—"I just vant to be alone" and all that. I'm so glad we all agree about how great Crawford is here. For me, she nails the film's surprisingly dark ambience best. I love her most in the scenes where she's negotiating her relationships with the men around her, first with John Barrymore as the two of them, through some of the film's best dialogue, recognize a mirror image in the other, and later with Wallace Beery as they hash out the terms of her "employment." Like everyone in the film, she's grasping desperately for control over something in her life, and like everyone, her control is mostly an illusion. I think the only actor who doesn't nail practically every scene is Lionel Barrymore, who overplays his drunk scenes and is saddled with some painful "you like me, you really like me" lines, but his confrontation with Beery in the bar is one of the film's best moments.

I don't want to slight its technical achievements, either—Nick alluded to the great lighting and Art Deco sets, but I was especially impressed with the camera work, which seems to have recovered from the great-step-backward of Cimarron and recaptured All Quiet on the Western Front's fluidity. Those twin show-offy tracking shots through the lobby are fun, but I especially appreciated that it eschewed the boring pattern of 20-foot-high establishing shots and medium shots of its predecessor, instead valuing those luscious closeups. And I don't want to rewatch even a second of Cimmaron to double-check this, but is this the first of our Best Pictures with an incidental score—not just over the titles, but during dialogue scenes as well?

NATHANIEL: Ah but what hath Grand Hotel wrought in doing so? I love the star mojo in the movie but the closeups are so well lit and performed and it's not always this way. Movies are rarely this careful in lighting now. And the acting... well, there's not always a reason to be cropping out entire bodies and even the tops and bottom of star faces as is the current style. I don't really want to measure the size of an actors pores. I just want to be wowed by screen beauty. Nowadays actors will get full frame treatment even if they're just doing something incidental like ordering food. It dilutes the actual potency of the important closeups. I love long shots and medium shots.

MIKE: The shots in GH really do show us how much has changed. By 1932, the "classic Hollywood look" seems to have been pretty much in place, as demonstrated here, and films made from there until the end of the studio system seemed to have a basic grasp of shot and editing patterns that gave proper weight to various shot sizes (of course I'm totally overgeneralizing). Each type of shot has its place, even the eyebrow-to-chin closeup favored today (and even the handheld shakycam that seems to be the default now), but I wish modern filmmakers thought variation was more important.

NATHANIEL: I hadn't really thought about this in terms of Lord of the Rings but as Nick suggested, the closeups in the third installment don't always pay off. It's one of the reasons I've never sat down to watch the trilogy back to back to back. I fear that after seeing Elijah Wood (bless) worry beatifically in tight closeup 20 times, you've seen all there is to see. And I'm guessing it's a lot more than 20 times if you do the marathon. Would the trilogy have lost some of its magic if we didn't have those year long breaks?

NICK: Oh, we wouldn't want to berate Grand Hotel for its paler (that is, even glossier) imitators any more than we'd want to arraign The Lord of the Rings for all of the Narnias and Golden Compasses and Spiderwicks we've been sloshing through since. If anything, when I see something like Pan's Labyrinth being robustly over-praised and over-Oscared, which never would have happened pre-LOTR, I'm glad to see an under-served genre like fantasy enjoying some benefit of the doubt, even from the AARP—I mean, AMPAS.

I've never done a 12-hour Rings-o-rama, either, Nathaniel, and I agree that the films wouldn't necessarily benefit. I'm guessing a lot of the battle scenes would start to look the same and the big speeches would run together—even within ROTK, this becomes a problem—and I've already made clear that the first installment is, for me, the grandest and the smartest.

MIKE: I think the pacing of the releases was perfect. Closer together, and I'd have overdosed on them; farther apart, and my faulty memory would have required revisits of the previous films (and perhaps forced me to give in to the temptation to watch the overindulgent "extended editions"). Speaking of losing some magic, I found that I was a lot less involved in ROTK watching it on my TV at home. It felt like theatrical viewing is required for something that's shooting for this level of majesty. I found the effects to be less convincing and the sheer blow-you-away scale I remember from seeing it in the theater to be pretty much gone. I still think it's a pretty great film, but its flaws are a lot more visible on the smaller screen (which seems counterintuitive).

NICK: Since I've been a bit stingy with my praise and I know we're all fans, I love the sheer, striving spectacle and the lack of cynicism that Return of the King brought to multiplexes, and I do love almost any BP winner that is such an anomalous pick for Oscar. For that matter, I'm hard-pressed to think of another Best Picture winner that much resembles Grand Hotel, either, in its unique blend of escapism and melancholy, and its successful admixture of dissimilar actors. Who knew that Crawford and Beery could shine in the same movie, and that any scenery could survive with two Barrymores on the premises? Future crazy-quilts of star cameos like some of the 1950s winners don't come anywhere close to what this picture achieves. Grand Hotel and Lord of the Rings aren't perfect, but their strongest elements and their dodgiest imitators confirm how special they are... and though neither would have won my vote, I love that Oscar's frequently lockstep voters appreciated and stood behind them.

Readers, what do you think about serial endings, use and abuse of closeups, Joan Crawford, our neglect of poor Gollum, etc. etc.?

More stuff: Nathaniel's post, Nick's post.

Previously: #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men

Silent Sunday: Don't Change Your Husband (1919)

In the first film Gloria Swanson made with Cecil B. DeMille, a pairing that would produce six films and make Swanson one of the biggest stars of the silent screen, she goes around dressed like a peacock, swathed in Oriental scarves and headdresses. She's a longsuffering wife whose husband is a slob, and when a suave ladykiller starts sniffing around, she falls for it. But the grass is always greener, better the devil you know, etc.—these words of wisdom exist for a reason!

The DVD presentation brings up a common issue, especially when dealing with films that aren't under copyright protection anymore. It's part of Passport Video's Gloria Swanson Collection, and I'll admit that I'm happy to be able to see it at all, but I wish these companies would put a little effort into their presentation. There's no restoration to speak of, I'm convinced the "ending" we see is in fact evidence of missing footage, and, most gallingly, Passport chose to brand the picture with a "Gloria Swanson Collection" logo that never goes away; it sits there like someone spit on the screen.

Read the full review.

Million Dollar Land Grab

It's time for the fourth installment of Best Pictures from the Outside In, wherein Nathaniel, Nick, and I discuss Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby.

That's all I have left, aside from jet lag. Read the conversation.

Silent Sunday: Brandherd (1921)

Brandherd hasn't ever been shown in the United States, at least not since the 1920s, which is a damn shame. Its particular brand of Expressionism is unusual—instead of crazy angles and painted shadows, it uses little scribbles, in chalk or crayon, on everything, to indicate where light and shadow are falling. (Sorry, no stills—I saw it at the Cinematheque Francaise, and I can't locate any online. Wish you could see it. It's really wild.)

Read the full review.

Silent Sunday: Salome (1923)

Alla Nazimova's titanic flop Salome is positively florid, with sets and costumes after Beardsley and acting somewhere between Stanislavski and Pavlova. It's really weird, for lack of a better word, and interesting because it's like nothing I've ever seen before. It's too bad it's hampered by a painfully glacial pace.

Read the full review.

I'm going to Paris and Rome! I'm hoping to post some travelogues like I did during my trips to England and Southeast Asia (and other exotic places like Michigan and Maine). And I'll be participating in the fourth installment of Best Pictures from the Outside In, this time discussing Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby.

"We try not to be killed/racists, but sometimes we are."

The third installment of our trip to the middle of Oscar's top category is up over at Nick's Flick Picks. This time, we address Crash's deficiencies and All Quiet on the Western Front's general greatness. Despite what you've heard, Crash is not the worst film to ever win Best Picture. (You'll have to wait almost six months to hear my nomination for that prize.) And I think that I wasn't exactly fair to it in some respects in my original review: Nick opened it up to me quite a bit when he suggested that it's "a Eugene O'Neill-ish exercise in forcing characters to speak their subconscious thoughts aloud." But on second viewing, even if I can credit it for not attempting to be completely realistic, I can't credit its substandard cinematic qualities, and I still can't credit its reductive ideas about race.

The second or third time around was still kind to All Quiet on the Western Front, which currently sits at #14 on my Top 100 of All Time. That list needs a major overhaul—perhaps even defenestration—but when and if I get around to patching its leaks and throwing the bums out, this film is staying, at least in the top half.

But that's enough from me, because I'm running around ineffectually attempting to prepare for my upcoming European vacation. Have at it!

Silent Sunday: His People (1925)

"Scattered for centuries, these people have come from the four corners of Europe, each bringing a dream of prosperity and happiness, but finding only the reality of hard work, suffering, and privation."

This slice-of-life story of one Jewish family's hardships in a ghetto in an unnamed American city features one of the early stars of Jewish theater, Rudolph Schildkraut, who's probably best known as Caiaphas, the high priest of Israel in DeMille's 1927 epic The King of Kings, but whom I had never heard of before renting this film. He's quite an actor, or at least quite a presence, and the film uses his eminence well.

It's a bit of a shame that this film is only available on a $72 "for educational use" DVD published by Brandeis University's National Center for Jewish Film, because it deserves a larger audience. It's a really interesting look at a group of people who didn't get much favorable coverage from mainstream films.

Read the full review.

A Certain Bank-Owned Cinema II: Cinema Harder

The Other Michael Phillips wrote a nice article about that certain bank-owned revival house. But I don't think I've ever called him "fake." I just claim to be the original Michael Phillips.

The Feckin' Braadway Melody

Welcome to the second edition of Best Pictures from the Outside In, with a title provided by one of our participants, Nick of Nick's Flick Picks. The other two are Nathaniel of The Film Experience and yours truly, Mike at Goatdog's Movies. Each week we pull two Best Picture winners from Oscar's shelves, one from each end; last week we discussed the first and most recent winners, Wings and The Departed.

This time around, Oscar somehow knew that someday we'd spend part of the first week of this series harping on how guy-centric the Best Picture category tends to be, so he awarded the second Best Picture, for films released between August 2, 1928 and July 31, 1929, to the mother of all backstage musicals, The Broadway Melody, which follows the rise-to-the-top exploits of two dancing Midwestern sisters (Bessie Love and Anita Page) trying to make it big in the Big Apple. On the other end of the historical and thematic spectrum is 2006's The Departed, a hyper-masculine epic of crime and punishment that follows two double agents (Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio) as they rise through the ranks of the cops and the crooks, respectively.

Mike: It's almost impossible, given the structure of this series, to avoid seeing parallels, and they're here: the scratch-and-claw rise to the top of the heap, the love triangles, the ghastly shootings—well, in one of them. But let me get this party started with two points of interest. First is the role of sound in The Broadway Melody, which, since it was released just over a year after Al Jolson said "you ain't heard nothing yet," is both a prisoner to its technical limitations and admirably adept at overcoming them, at least sometimes. Coming in the middle of the biggest technical overhaul in film history, it's a fascinating report card on how the film industry was coming along in its transition. Second, exactly how amazing is Vera Farmiga in The Departed? She takes a role that's basically a ruler against which the two alpha males can measure their dicks [is that too harsh? i don't think so] and makes Madolyn not only a three-dimensional person, but one of the most interesting characters in the film.

Nathaniel: It's an impossible role to be sure. So, Farmiga deserves props from making something of it. What she makes of it... well, your mileage may vary. But on this second viewing I was reminded that most everyone in The Departed is at the top of their game. Damon and DiCaprio are both even better on repeat viewings. They're so tightly strung one half expects them to snap in virtually every scene. DiCaprio's worry line cut so deep I wanted to suture it. Ouch. Scorsese knows how to sell urgency and I love imagining that behind the scenes the actors were all fully aware of how easily they could get lost in the big ensemble. They're following Frank Costello's opening credo: "No one gives it to you. You have to take it."

As for the mechanics of movie-making—narrowing it to sound is smart—The Departed sounds terrific, capitalizing on years of the technical virtuousity. We're all accustomed to the way movies overlap sound from one scene to the next (the visual equivalent being the dissolve) but with The Departed... is it just my imagination or does Scorsese let the sound bleed for much longer than other films do. The result is that everything feels simultaneous and dangerously fast. I found that a huge relief after the clumsiness of Broadway Melody. The latter plays so awkwardly for modern ears, its sound jarringly cutting in and out with each edit. It's undermic'ed. It's overmic'ed. It's a mess, an unpleasant experience. Though I did get a good chuckle from the opening prologue which feels crazy with elation about throwing all the sound at you at once. "Listen to what we can do: Crowd sounds. Office noise. Dialogue. Music! Hear it! Isn't it wonderful?"

Nick: I'm absolutely on the Vera Farmiga train, which is just a keyhole into my favorite aspect of The Departed: you think it's going to be a high-concept picture, about two protagonists in this chiastic, unknowing pursuit of each other, and instead it's a sprawling, calico suspense-thriller character-drama, where this huge host of sterling actors is given full license to bleed all kinds of life and idiosyncrasy into the story, all of them creating real people who don't seem aware at all of "supporting" Damon and DiCaprio, who in turn don't seem aware of giving star turns in a big prestige picture. Nicholson remains a problem for me, shouty and arrogantly effusive, but Alec Baldwin, Vera Farmiga, Anthony Anderson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and so many others make this an enormously gratifying psychological experience. Plus a great thrill-ride, mostly for those sound and editing rhythms that Nathaniel describes. Love those occasional freeze-frames. And even if a couple of the set-pieces don't pan out (DiCaprio stalking Damon out of the movie theater always feels a bit clunky to me), the rooftop catastrophe, the turn-your-cellphones-off espionage job in the warehouse, the second rooftop catastrophe... those are sensational sequences.

By contrast, The Broadway Melody seems pretty beholden to its central love-triangle plot and its self-conscious technical breakthrough. Almost everything is keyed in those two directions, which only underlines the fact that the movie is too long. I'm guessing I was a little less impressed than you, Mike (albeit less sensitive to the evolving, year-by-year standards for sound incorporation), and more impressed than you, Nathaniel. I'm pretty shocked that none of the filmmakers seemed bothered by the fact that the Mahoney Sisters are just a terrible act, but as the film goes on—and again, it does go on—I got much more interested this time in Hank's increasing panic and unhappiness, and even a little bit in Queenie's sexual-romantic dilemma, despite the frequent ghastliness of Anita Page's gangly and tentative performance. Did these hooks work for either of you?

Nathaniel: Oddly, absolutely nothing worked for me in Broadway Melody save for those moments when it suddenly forgot to be a sound picture. There's a few blissful cutaway shots where the sound drops out and you get just a close-up of a face or a reaction shot, usually of Hank (the elder more business savvy sister) looking concerned for Queenie (the younger). It was a silent movie for a few seconds. It's the only time I felt anything for the characters.

Another connection between the films: There's a complete shortage of sympathetic characters, a surprise given that we always think of Best Pictures as erring on the side of playing for the heartstrings. My mind quickly jumps to Million Dollar Baby (a subject for a few weeks from now) when there's barely a character flaw in sight. The leads in Broadway Melody are talent-free, deceitful and contemptuous of anyone else in the theater. They lie to each other repeatedly. But it's not a Chicago style black comedy. We're supposedly to genuinely care for them but they do nothing to earn it. The Departed? Even the lovely Farmiga is ethically challenged. "Cops or criminals: What's the difference?" as the movie itself asks.

Mike: Let me clarify: I don't really like The Broadway Melody—it's got to be in the bottom five winners—and whatever praise I have for it is indeed for how well it escapes the strictures of late-20s sound. Yes, it trumpets, probably too much, the mere fact that it has "Crowd sounds. Office noise. Dialogue. Music!" (which Nathaniel described so well). And to modern ears, the sound problems you described are off-putting. But from a film history standpoint, it's pretty amazing how far it is from the stereotypical Singin' in the Rain-style "let's all stand around the flower pot" techniques. It has sound coming from multiple sources, and the filmmakers achieved this even if they had to bring in a phonograph or an orchestra to play offscreen. As for the bad acts that are the Maloney Sisters ("Mahoney!"), the second time around didn't make me care much more about Hank, and even less about Queenie, although it did pique my interest in the boundaries of their relationship—I think Hank has a hankering for her sister that goes beyond simple sisterly protectiveness.

And as for The Departed, I'm not afraid to admit it. I had to look up "chiastic." And then I had to look up "chiasmus." And I really, honestly hate Jack Nicholson in this film, beyond my usual disdain for the accolades he tends to receive for doing that "Crazy Jack" thing again and again. But he's the only bad apple in this bunch. Well, unless you count the point that Nathaniel brought up about this being the most morally deficient bunch of liars and cheats and self-deluders possibly in the history of this category. Really, it's still quite surprising that this film won, given its genre, its general lack of sympathetic characters, and its violence. This might be a silly question, but why do you think Oscar picked this particular Scorsese film to honor?

Nick: Well, I personally think The Departed won because the other four nominees were impossible as winners—even though I realize that if one of them had won, I'd say it was because the other four, including The Departed, were impossible as winners. But given that we all knew people who thought Babel was overstrained and Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen were awfully modest and Letters from Iwo Jima was quite aloof (and fans as well as detractors of these movies seemed to agree frequently on these counts), how do you NOT vote for the propulsive energy of this film, dignified by a big and tony cast, and directed by a badly owed auteur. Plus, even though few people think The Departed is among Scorsese's best, I'm sure I heard a sigh of relief that there was more left in him than Gangs of New York and The Aviator. Honoring him for those would, to me, would have been like belatedly anointing Hitchcock for Torn Curtain or Topaz.

In the category of Never Thought I'd See the Day, I feel an urge to say something else in favor of The Broadway Melody, even beyond the sheer, outrageous, derisive pleasure of watching Bessie Love kick in a circle like an autistic stork and play her ukulele as a badge of her "art." I actually respect the movie—there's a huge Spoiler warning over this whole feature, right?—for stranding Hank so glumly with the arch, indifferent, deliciously bitchy Flo at the end of the film. Queenie, the avowed idiot, gets a lover no one would want, and Hank, to make it in show business, has to give up the man she loves and cast her lot with a bitter floozy. In contrast to all the rootin' tootin' for the Broadway life that we hear through the whole movie, the finale seems pretty brave. And in line with Nathaniel's point about the strangely off-putting character arcs throughout. (For the real deal, i.e., a really good movie, hang in there for Broadway Melody of 1940, with my favorite Fred Astaire acting performance, and a series of wowza dances with Fred and the incredible Eleanor Powell.)

By the way, speaking of other people's points, how did the straight guy in our trio beat us to the actressexual punch on Vera Farmiga, Nathaniel, and THEN drop the first hint about Hank and Queenie's lavender closet? We're such loafers, even if we are also light in them.

Mike: I'm straight but not narrow. Also, I hang around in real life and on the internet with actressexuals; it was bound to rub off eventually.

Nathaniel: I have to confess: the lavender streak never once crossed my mind—I was probably too flustered by that old school dyke (excuse me "big woman") and fag (flamey costume designer) bitchfight in the chorus girls dressing room. There's even a literal "lavender" punch-line in the scene. But reading Goatdog's errant line about sisterlove felt like a thunderbolt. Hank (love the name) is way too invested in her sibling. It's practically the Hotel New Hampshire Melody once Hank starts fretting about Queenie wandering from their (shared) bed.

Not that I want to turn this series into Uncovering Oscar's Gay Agenda but it has been a little weird how plentiful the homo subtext has been in three of these first four movies (with the exception of No Country for Old Men). I don't want to underline this too much, but consider The Departed's fascination with Colin's (Matt Damon) troubled sexuality: the constant references to homosexuality, the impotence... It's pretty meaty stuff if you're looking to dig deeper. All of the best Hollywood movies have those hidden layers if you want to dig for or argue about them, with the frosting of pure entertainment on top if you don't.

I'd love to share Nick's feelings about the wrap-up of Broadway Melody but I don't think those "settling for" beats are intentional. Surely, the movie hasn't been that smart or self-aware previously? Too me The Broadway Melody is all frosting. It's gone awfully stale since 1929.

What do you, the reader, think about Oscar's Secret Gay Agenda? Or other things...

Stats: Depending on who you ask, The Broadway Melody was nominated for three Oscars and won only Best Picture. The two "nominations" for Best Actress (Bessie Love) and Best Director (Harry Beaumont) were unofficial.
The Departed was nominated for five and won four (Picture, Director, Editing, and Adapted Screenplay).

Silent Sunday: The Delicious Little Devil (1919)

This rather unfunny comedy is available on DVD because of a certain fifth-billed actor who hadn't yet settled on a moniker yet; his birth name was too ungainly (Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla), so here he's billed as Rudolpho De Valintine, but later he'd settle on Rudolph Valentino.

Unfortunately, absent the exotic locales and the heavy makeup, he lacks that androgynous sex appeal that made him so famous, and since the main attraction here is the rather unsexy and mostly unfunny Mae Murray, there's really not much reason to watch this aside from curiosity about what Valentino was like before he was Valentino.

Read the full review.

Previous Silent Sundays:

June 15: I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918)
June 8: The Kiss of Mary Pickford (1927)
June 1: Hot Water (1924)
May 25: La Chute de la maison Usher (1928)
May 18: After Death (1915)

Best Pictures from the Outside In vol. 1: No Country for Old Wings

Nathaniel, Nick, and I have teamed up for a gargantuan, impossible, possibly crazy series of posts in which we will talk about all 80 Best Picture winners, two at a time, starting with the first and the last and working our way in toward the middle—like a dagger pointed at the heart of Oliver! Head over to The Film Experience Blog for the inaugural post.

We covered a lot of ground: Best Picture's traditional disdain for women, the need for Best Pictures to be all things for all people, the fact that Wings is a really good movie, etc. I had hoped to write a full-length review of each film, but that's not happening (I wrote a review of Wings seven years ago [my god I can't believe I've been doing this for more than seven years], but I no longer like it), so here are some thoughts about each.

No Country for Old Men hung around near the bottom of my 2007 top ten list on the strength of its first impression, but perhaps even then I was finding it wanting—I kept having to remind myself how good it was. The second time around, it doesn't hold up as well. What still works? First and foremost is the sound design, which, in a film with so little dialog, does all the talking; in two scenes in particular—Llewelyn's attempts to retrieve the suitcase from the air duct and, later, his preparation for Chigurh's raid on his hotel room—the layers of sound add to an already unbearable tension, to the point where the inevitable violence is a relief. The film's array of seemingly unstoppable forces—"you can't stop what's coming"—is also handled with aplomb, from the obvious (Anton Chigurh) to the unusual (the pit bull that won't stop chasing Llewelyn). I still love the entire first act, the deliberate pace of Chigurh's hunt for Llewelyn, the staging and editing of their gunfight, and smaller touches like the conversation Harrelson and Brolin have about welding. However, the threads holding these pieces together as a complete film seem weaker, and as the film progresses, the Coens lose their tight grip on the tone, drifting again and again into the kind of exaggeration that works in their comedies but doesn't belong in a film so self-serious. It's a series of dazzling setpieces in search of a tighter structure and a firmer hand on the tiller.

Wings, on the other hand, improved immensely on second viewing, for a number of reasons. First, I think, is that non-comedy silent films are something that takes a little getting used to. Because I watched this one rather early in my silent film career, many of that period's eccentricities stuck out to my untrained eye. Also, maybe because I was so wowed by the action scenes, I didn't notice how great the quieter moments were. It's a more complete film than I had initially given it credit for. The action scenes are still among the best ever shot, and I especially appreciate the introduction of and battle against the monstrous Gotha airship, which seems like something out of a horror film. But the back-home scenes, especially the ones contrasting the family sendoffs that Jack and David receive, feel much more resonant now, and they add a lot of emotional weight that makes the film a more complete work of art. Finally, the years between my two viewings made me endlessly thankful that the film is silent, because we're spared second-rate dialect comedian El Brendel's fake-Swedish act. As annoying as he is in this film, thank your lucky stars that you didn't have to listen to him.

A Certain Bank-Owned Cinema

Chicagoist has an informative interview with the programmers of a certain bank-owned cinema in a large Midwestern city. (Ok, fine, one of them is me. Blogs are all about self-promotion, right?)

Silent Sunday: I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918)

Ernst Lubitsch offers an early glimpse of the joys of Weimar cinema with this cross-dressing comedy about a young girl who emancipates herself by dressing up in men's evening clothes and going out on the town. She supposedly learns some lessons about how hard men really have it, but I don't think Lubitsch is convinced, and besides, he's more interested in the romantic possibilities of the situation. Ossi's romanced by her Teutonic tutor, who thinks she's a he, but things don't turn out the way they do in countless Hollywood comedies of gender confusion.

The film is available on DVD as part of Kino's exquisite "Lubitsch in Berlin" set, which contains a good cross-section of the light comedies and historical epics he made before heading west to Hollywood in 1923.

Read the full review.

Movies About Movies Blog-a-Thon, August 22-24

"The only thing Hollywood relishes more than looking in the mirror is a light spanking."
—Michael King
"Seriously, how could you go wrong with Sullivan's Travels, Day for Night, 8 1/2, or Sunset Boulevard?"
—Dame James Henry

How indeed. Since at least 1913, one of the film industry's favorite topics has been itself. There are films about the insanity of the filmmaking process, about the neuroses of the people who make them, about the pleasures they bring to viewers. From the bitter cynicism of The Player, The Big Knife, Sunset Blvd., and so many others, to the happier endings of Movie Crazy and Singin' in the Rain, movies about movies are one of my favorite sub-genres.

If you feel the same way, over the weekend of August 22-24, write a post about a movie about the movies. You have at least 95 years' worth of films to choose from; if you're not sure what to pick, here's a list of suggestions. If you would like to participate, email me and let me know. I'll send out periodic, but not naggy, reminders as the event approaches.

After the jump you'll find several other graphics. Please feel free to use any/all of them, and help spread the word.

(Sullivan's Travels)

(Singin' in the Rain)

(Irma Vep)

(Inland Empire)

(Ed Wood)

(Sunset Blvd.)

(8 1/2)

The one at the top is from Contempt.

Silent Sunday: The Kiss of Mary Pickford (1927)

In 1926, while visiting Moscow, Hollywood supercouple Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks starred in a film about a young man who wants to become a movie star to impress his girlfriend. Pickford only learned about the film late in life, and Fairbanks died never knowing about it. The director, Sergei Komarov, had posed as a newsreel cameraman and convinced the superstars to clown around for him, including getting Mary to play a silly love scene with a bearded Russian actor (he loves me, he loves me not), at the end of which she kisses him. Around this footage, he constructed an American-style slapstick comedy about the unhealthy obsession with fame.

Read the full review.

Silent Sunday: Hot Water (1924)

I continue my silent education with a lesser-known Harold Lloyd comedy in which the middle-class everyman deals with domestic chores, unwanted relatives, and existential horror. Will he get the groceries home intact? Will he get a speeding ticket?

Will he hang for murder?

The film starts off pretty well, slooooows down to a crawl, and then redeems itself with what just might be one of the funniest finales in silent comedy. (I can't say for sure—I haven't seen enough.)

Read the full review.

It's (Almost) On

By the pricking of my thumbs
something wicked this way comes.

Silent Sunday: La Chute de la maison Usher (1928)

I watched this surrealist masterpiece late at night, in the dark, by myself. It's among the scariest movies I've ever watched, and is surely the most effective at dragging you into its nightmare. I couldn't sleep that night, and Jean Debucourt's haunted, blank stare and a wispy white lace dragging through the water cropped up in my dreams on several subsequent nights.

But the real nightmare is that this appears to be the only Jean Epstein film available on DVD in the United States.

Read the full review.

(I'm using the French title to distinguish this from James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's version of Poe's story, which was also released in 1928 and which, according to Nick, is the 24th best film of all time.)

You Asked for It: Ballad of a Soldier (1959)

For the inaugural entry in my every-few-weeks series of reader-requested reviews, Nathaniel won the sweepstakes, but I received the reward: I finally got around to watching this touching, heartbreaking, and gorgeously shot film about a soldier's interaction with various elements of Russian society on his way home for a brief leave (ma's roof needs fixing). Thanks, Nat: I can't imagine a better start to this series.

Read the full review.

There were so many great suggestions in my original post that I've decided to just work through those. The next one, according to Random.org, is going to be Thom's pick of Duel in the Sun (1946). Check back in a couple weeks for a review of the Western epic that (or so sez IMDB) seven directors had a hand in creating.

Final Girl Film Club: The Devil's Daughter

Final Girl, my favorite horror film blog (ok, the only horror film blog I read), has a monthly movie club in which she picks a horror film and bloggers do what they do: they blog. This month's pick is a 1973 made-for-TV movie, The Devil's Daughter. What did I get myself into? Would I have to reach for my rhyming dictionary like the last time I was confronted with an assignment, a deadline, and a horror film?

But it was surprisingly good, so good that I decided not to write a single rhyme about it. I really enjoyed its blend of inventive borrowing from other genre films and original touches. It shows its TV roots in its technical failings, but hell, lots of theatrical releases display abject amateurishness.

Read the full review.

Silent Sunday: After Death (1915)

Russian director Yevgeni Bauer directed 26 films during a four-year career before his death from pneumonia in 1917. William M. Drew wrote a fine introduction to Bauer's career; he tells us that Bauer made comedies, social dramas, and historical films, but what he's best known for are his dark tales of obsession. Three of these films, Twilight of a Woman's Soul, The Dying Swan, and this one, After Death, are available on DVD from Image Entertainment.

Here, the fates of Andrei (Vitold Polonsky), an introverted, even misanthropic scholar, and Zoya (Vera Karalli), a mysterious, beautiful actress, intertwine into a tangled knot of guilt that even death can't dispel. Or maybe it's that only death can dispel it.

Read the full review.

(This is an attempt to start a regular feature. We'll see how regular it ends up.)

Screencap 1 (Unborn Elephant)

(Stealing an idea from Nathaniel, among others.) (I'll identify the movie in a few days.)

Charley Chase's 1925 film Isn't Life Terrible? isn't up to Chase's usual standards, at least judging by what I've seen of his work. The Leo McCarey-directed short unfortunately depends for much of its running time on racial humor, as Chase and his wife inadvertently swap their daughter for a little black girl while embarking on a cruise. I'm assuming that the repeated closeups on the child (who, incidentally, is cute as a button) are supposed to be hilarious, but I didn't find them so funny. Overall, the film is sloppy. The scene from which I extracted this intertitle is typically confusing: Charley and a camping-gear salesman are lying together on a foldable camp bed, and one of them says the line about the unborn elephants, which is a lead-in to a punchline: "I can feel their tusks in my back." It appears that they're both talking before the intertitle comes up, and while it's obviously Charley's punchline, it's unclear who sets it up. Plus, it's not very funny anyway.

Travis deserves special mention: he guessed Big Red Riding Hood, a Charley Chase short from the same year (released a mere 90 days earlier) and also directed by McCarey.

Order Me Around

As a break from the top-down, "I choose all the reviews I'm going to write," autocratic site-management style I've been using since 2000, I've decided to ask readers to pick some movies for me to review. Another way to put this is that I've been having a hard time convincing myself to write reviews lately, but I seem to do all right when I have an externally imposed deadline. However you want to look at it, I'm asking you for reviewing assignments.

Post a suggestion in the comments. When I get five of them, I'll have Random.org's integer generator choose the winner. I'll post a review of that film within two weeks. Then I'll repeat the process with a new batch of suggestions.

Your suggestion should be available on Netflix (while you're at it, become my Netflix friend). Also, it should be something I haven't seen, or at least something I haven't seen in a long time. If I've seen your suggestion, I'll ask you for a replacement.

No Uwe Boll films, please.

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.

Suffer (from) the Children

(This is my day-late entry for Final Girl's Hey, Internet, Stop Being Such Cynical Effing Douchebags Blog-a-Thon! (which I didn't hear about until today), in which she's encouraged online critics to "wear your heart on your sleeve and tell us all why you love something." In honor of our host's dedication to horror films, I decided to praise a criminally underseen and misunderstood entry in the "scary little kid" subgenre.)

One can only imagine what awful child-related experience prompted Carlton Albright and Edward Terry to write a screenplay as horrific as The Children; perhaps they suspect their kids of being the mailman's progeny. The "scary little kid" subgenre has never been scarier or more nihilistic than this incredibly effective and incredibly nasty bargain-basement shockfest. Its premise is simple: a busload of kids drives through a toxic fog and turns into... into what? They still look like apple-cheeked, sweet-faced munchkins, except their fingernails are black, and if they touch you, they melt the flesh from your bones. To paraphrase the song, I believe the children are our future, and there ain't no future here.

After a prologue that establishes the source of the toxic fog, we follow the sheriff (Gil Rogers) as he tries to figure out why the school bus would be sitting empty on the side of the road. After he finds the first victim (the bus driver), his immediate concern is again with the children: who will protect them from whatever did this to the driver? It takes everyone concerned an inordinately long time to decide, finally, that the kids are the reason behind the rapidly accumulating bodies. But that's natural: we in the audience know we're watching a horror film called The Children, but it's almost against our instincts to suspect children of being capable of killing.

The acting and dialogue are standard for the horror genre, meaning that they're basically sub-par, but that fact doesn't detract from the movie's effectiveness a whit. Director Max Kalmanowicz's staging of scenes is nothing special during the first two acts, when it's still daylight and the adults are still trying to figure out what's going on. But once night falls, his true gifts come into play. Under cover of near-darkness, he exhibits an almost supernatural mastery of simple, evocative, and scary-as-hell shot framing, shock reveals, and pacing. He doesn't make the mistake, common in the slasher genre, of overlighting his shots: the lighting here is the familiar blindness-inducing pitch black of a moonless night, in which headlights, flashlights, and candles illuminate just enough to remind you of how cavern-dark everything else is. It's here, in the dark, where he uses his scary kids brilliantly. Smiling, arms outstretched, calling "mommy, mommy" in their piping voices, they loom out of the blackness like pretty little angels of death: this is the single scariest image I can remember from any horror film.

And if the soul-destroying horror of children turned into monsters weren't enough, the film bravely (if that's the right word; "sadistically" would fit too) follows through on its premise by making the destruction of the children necessary (i.e., there's no cure) and even more awful than the children themselves: only chopping off their hands will stop them. Both hands. That the camera pulls away from the scene of greatest carnage is no salve: the camera tracks slowly, sinuously out of a barn, into the yard, through a house, through the woods, as unearthly screams prompt our imaginations to supply pictures more nauseating than any makeup artist could create. And that's not even the most disturbing, or nihilistic, of the film's little horrors—it saves its biggest kick for last.

The unfair 5.1 rating on IMDB could reflect any number of things: disgust with The Children's awful nihilism, or failure to look past the low-budget aesthetics to the impressive way Kalmanowicz and company embrace and twist the genre's conventions and limitations. It's certainly not for everybody. It's probably not for most people. You know who you are.

Top Ten Films of 2007, or, Time to Move On

Yes, I realize that it's more than one-sixth of the way through 2008: it's still not too late to finally list my top ten films of last year. Especially because, if I don't do it now, I might never do it (see, for example, my incomplete 2006 list). I've recycled some of the descriptions from my unfinished Goaties because otherwise I might have never finished these.

So here goes: the best films I saw last year.

10. Honeydripper, John Sayles's latest, was dumped unceremoniously into the post-Christmas netherworld, and it's a damned shame, because it's among his best in years. Sayles presents an imaginative parable of the birth of rock 'n' roll, lets some of the best African American actors around chew on his meaty dialogue, and doesn't overreach by trying to cram in too many storylines.

9. No Country for Old Men. The Coens won their first Director and Picture Oscars for this modern western that springs from a slick tale of the aftermath of a botched drug deal into convention-busting shifts in tone and ballsy narrative surprises. It helped turn Josh Brolin into Hollywood's new post-ironic man's man, gave Tommy Lee Jones one of (apparently—I still haven't seen In the Valley of Elah) two memorable roles last year, and introduced one of the cinema's most memorable bad guys in Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh.

8. Red Road is a surprising, sometimes opaque non-thriller thriller about revenge and guilt. It's quarterbacked by Kate Dickie, in one of the year's best performances, as one of the people who monitor the countless privacy-sucking cameras that blanket Glasgow; one day, she sees someone who shouldn't be there. And that's all I can say: Andrea Arnold's film is so secretive and enigmatic for most of its running time that I wouldn't dream of revealing more than that.

7. In A Mighty Heart, Angelina Jolie gave the best female performance of the year, and part of what made it so great was her generosity: she and Michael Winterbottom, always an interesting director (except when he's wanking), position Marianne Pearl in the middle of an impressive array of supporting roles, and the film is more interested in how Jolie shares the scenes with her fellow actors than in being The Angie Show. All of this exists in a tense, expertly directed suspense film that was inexplicably dismissed by many critics and ignored by most awards.

6. No End in Sight explains, in agonizing detail (agonizing because it's so completely horrendous), why the situation in Iraq is as screwed up as it is; interviews with such surprisingly high-profile players as George Packer and General Jay Garner, whose short-lived tenure as top American in Baghdad showed the promise of success and whose quick removal illustrated the Bush administration's almost willful destruction of any chance of cleaning up the mess they started with the 2003 invasion. The documentary is insightful, informative, and the most depressing film in a year of notable depressing films.

5. Black Book is a sexy, old-fashioned spy thriller about a not-too-good spy (Carice Van Houlton) who falls in love with the not-too-bad Nazi she's been instructed to seduce. What's great about the film's depiction of this amateur Mata Hari is that Houlton sucks as a spy: she's obvious, nervous, and twitchy, and she doesn't fool anyone; what's great and surprising about Paul Verhoven's script and direction is that it shows the surrounding situation (Nazi occupation of the Netherlands) as oblivious to her merits or demerits as a snoop.

4. There Will Be Blood is an overambitious but fascinating achievement that's dragged through its rough spots by Paul Thomas Anderson's staggeringly assured directorial vision and Daniel Day-Lewis's earth-shaking performance. Its quirky take on American history leaves a lot out, but it succeeds as a parable of the role of greed and religion in American society. It's also frequently, and self-consciously, dazzling.

3. Zoo addresses its topic—men who have sex with horses—elliptically, by refusing to explain it, by almost refusing the very idea that it can be explained to someone who doesn't share that particular desire. There's an enigmatic scene in which one of the actors in the reenactments explains how he connected to his role by thinking of a particularly bad accident he witnessed; I was struck by what a tenuous and false connection he was creating, and I realized that the film was telling us the same thing: you think you can get your head around this, but you're wrong.

2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a nightmarish odyssey into totalitarianism. Anamaria Marinca gives one of the best performances of the year as a young woman who attempts to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate; guided by Oleg Mutu's unforgiving and unsteady handheld camera, we follow her into a hell that tests the limits of her friendship and our ability to keep from screaming. (I staggered out of this screening, shaken to the core, and then dashed off to see Wes Anderson's candy-coated triviality The Darjeeling Limited, a transition I do not recommend.)

1. Once is the kind of film that the do-it-yourself digital revolution was supposed to provide but so often doesn't: a small, personal, heartbreaking film that emphasizes the interactions between characters in a compelling way. Its music is heavenly, and the characters (played by musicians) who create it on- and offscreen are convincing and lived-in.

Oscar Predictions

Picture
Will Win: I've already blogged about how Juno is a likely upset; although I agree that my prediction is crazy, I'm sticking with it so I can be the guy who was right on this one.
Should Win: I wouldn't be disappointed with either No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood, or even Michael Clayton when it comes down to it. But There Will Be Blood is currently highest on my top ten list, so that's what should win.
Better Not Win: Joe Wright's great step backward Atonement certainly is pretty, and some scenes are well acted, but Wright couldn't figure out how to use any of it.

Director
Will Win: Joel and Ethan Coen have never won a directing Oscar, not even for critics' darling Fargo. They're due.
Should Win: This is actually a pretty solid group of nominees. I'm going with Paul Thomas Anderson because he makes his film work by sheer force of directorial vision, but I'd be fine with any of these worthies.
Better Not Win: Despite what a lot of people think, Oscar didn't embarrass himself by nominating Jason Reitman—he shows uncanny skill at coaxing great performances out of his cast—and therefore I abstain.

Actress
Will Win: Call me crazy upset guy, but I'm going with Marion Cotillard, who seems to have narrowed the gap between Julie Christie and the rest of the pack. Did she narrow it enough to take the gold? We'll see.
Should Win: Well, Angelina Jolie should win, but they didn't nominate her. So I'm going with Julie Christie.
Better Not Win: Why, exactly, did Cate Blanchett receive a second nomination for failing to develop one whit on her performance from 11 years ago?

Actor
Will Win: I think this is the only category that's utterly and completely locked up, aside from perhaps Original Screenplay. Daniel Day-Lewis will win his second Oscar, and...
Should Win: I can't say I disagree.
Better Not Win: Part of being in a musical is singing. Johnny Depp forgot that part.
Haven't Seen: Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah

Supporting Actress
Will Win: Despite Amy Ryan's winning just about every critics' award, and despite Ruby Dee's status as an un-Oscared elder, Cate Blanchett pulls off the dual feat of playing the opposite sex and doing a bang-up job of it.
Should Win: But where's the love for Tilda Swinton, who's the yin to Clooney's yang, the opposite moral pole of Michael Clayton's universe?
Better Not Win: They nominated the wrong Briony; Saoirse Ronan is a competent child actor, but Romola Garai was nearly great.

Supporting Actor
Will Win: As implacable and unstoppable as his character is Javier Bardem's drive for Oscar; none dare stand in his way.
Should Win: Who am I to argue with the Prince Valiant haircut and the air gun? Javier Bardem.
Better Not Win: In perhaps the biggest instance of category fraud since Pigskin Parade, Casey Affleck, who is the main character of his film, just might win an award he does not deserve. He's good; he's not a supporting actor.

Original Screenplay
Will Win: The biggest lock of the season seems to be Diablo Cody's screenplay for Juno.
Should Win: Beyond all the name-dropping in Juno is a smart, funny, sometimes painful look at a girl floundering between the rules of childhood and the realities of adulthood.
Better Not Win: Abstain. All of the nominees I've seen are worthy.
Haven't Seen: Lars and the Real Girl

Adapted Screenplay
Will Win: There Will Be Blood because this is where Oscar awards the critical darlings? No Country for Old Men because the Best Picture frontrunner almost always wins? I have no clue. Flipping the coin: No Country.
Should Win: I'm going with No Country for Old Men, although I'm not sure how many of the film's narrative and tonal surprises were the Coens' invention.
Better Not Win: The screenplay may have been the least of Atonement's problems, but aside from that first act, it didn't impress.

Animated Feature
Will Win: OK, some things are more locked up than Juno's screenplay award. Ratatouille, of course.
Should Win: I was more impressed with Persepolis; the animation style made up for some narrative weaknesses.
Haven't Seen: Surf's Up

Cinematography
Will Win: Although it doesn't look like there's a front-runner, I could see it going to either No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood. Flipping the coin: No Country
Should Win: I'm going with There Will Be Blood, but I wouldn't be upset if No Country won.
Better Not Win: It's certainly full of pretty pictures, but Atonement can't figure out how to use them. The worst offense is that Dunkirk tracking shot. Why?

Art Direction
Will Win: Ooh, it's a tossup. The only weak nominee here is The Golden Compass, but I'm going to go with There Will Be Blood because a lot of people who know more than I do about art direction have been saying that Jack Fisk needs to finally win.
Should Win: As long as The Golden Compass doesn't win, I am fine with whoever they pick.
Better Not Win: See above.

Costume Design
Will Win: The green dress. I mean Atonement. It has to win something.
Should Win: Dear god I don't know. I'll go with La Vie en Rose.
Better Not Win: We've already seen the costumes for Elizabeth II: Elizabeth Harder, so why bother noticing them again?

Visual Effects
Will Win: Two words: Giant robots. Transformers.
Should Win: But I wanted to see the damn things transform! I abstain.
Better Not Win: Those cartoonish "animals" from The Golden Compass.

Sound Editing
Will Win: Giant. Robots. Remember back in 1999 when The Matrix won the second-most awards, all on the strengths of its special effects? Transformers is going to win the second-most awards on Sunday.
Should Win: The empty whoosh of the air gun, the agonizing hollow clanking of the tentpoles in the HVAC system at the hotel: No Country for Old Men had a wealth of memorable sound effects, which I'm pretty sure this category is supposed to honor.
Better Not Win: I abstain. I could go with any of the nominees.

Sound Mixing
Will Win: Robots. That are giant. Transformers.
Should Win: The entire Bourne series has been unjustly ignored by Oscar, so here's where the sound team behind The Bourne Ultimatum should receive its "series achievement" award.
Better Not Win: I abstain. This is a quality bunch.

Editing
Will Win: Despite the fact that No Country for Old Men will not win Best Picture (see above), this is the kind of award that goes to the Best Picture winner, unless it goes to a whiz-bang action movie. So obviously No Country will win. I think.
Should Win: Let's see some more props for the team behind The Bourne Ultimatum, who have advanced chaotic fight scenes to the point where anything more choppy will induce seasickness.
Better Not Win: I'm not wild about Into the Wild's overreliance on montages.

Makeup
Will Win: There's certainly a lot of makeup in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film.
Should Win: Beautiful Marion Cotillard's transformation into unique-looking Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.
Better Not Win: I will not watch that Norbit film.

Best Documentary Feature
Will Win: I have no clue. Will the mainstream non-Iraq documentary win? I haven't seen enough of the nominees to comment on their quality. I'll go with Sicko because people like a good acceptance speech.
Should Win: Of the two I saw, No End in Sight was clearly superior; in fact, it's one of the ten best films of 2007.
Better Not Win: I haven't seen any of the other nominees.

Original Score
Will Win: Can anything beat the typewriter-clacking in Dario Marianelli's Atonement score?
Should Win: I can't say I'd disagree with that choice.
Better Not Win: I shouldn't let my dislike for The Kite Runner influence my opinion of its score, but all I remember about it is vaguely "ethnic" wails.

Original Song
Will Win: "Falling Slowly" from Once just has to be their pick; they insulted it in every other category it deserved.
Should Win: See above.
Better Not Win: The songs in Enchanted fell into three categories: outright parody ("Happy Working Song"), is-it-parody? ("That's How You Know"), and cheeseball slacking by Menken and Schwartz ("So Close").

As for the rest, I haven't seen any nominees, so I'll dispense with the chatter. Here are my completely uninformed predictions.

Foreign Language Film: Katyn
Documentary Short: Salim Baba
Animated Short: Madame Tutli-Putli
Live-Action Short: Tanghi Argentini

So the awards count at the end of the night for fictional films of feature length will be thus:

No Country for Old Men: 5
Transformers: 3
There Will Be Blood: 2
Atonement: 2
Juno: 2
La Vie en Rose: 1
I'm Not There: 1
Ratatouille: 1
Pirates of the Caribbean: 1
Once: 1

It's probably not too late to place your bets in Vegas; tell them goatdog sent you.

Why Juno Will Win Best Picture

1. It's the biggest moneymaker of all the Best Picture nominees, at $119 million and counting. It's brought in twice as much as its nearest rival, No Country for Old Men.

2. A lot of people really love this movie. Cal of Ultimate Addict pointed out that in addition to Ebert, it has Oprah. Oprah.

3. The love people experience for it is largely emotional (with many intellectual, well-thought-out exceptions).

3a. Viewers respect and admire There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, but they want to take Juno home with them. Plus,

3b. There Will Be Blood is just too weird and eccentric for Oscar, and

3c. No Country for Old Men is too dark and too, um, what should I call it? Nontraditional in its story structure and almost unfinished when it ends. This makes voters say "wow, that was really avant-garde," but it won't make them vote for it.

3d. Of the other options, Michael Clayton feels like prestige filler, and

3e. Atonement is the kind of serious literary adaptation that would have won in 1985, had Mr. McEwan written his novel back then.

4. Last year, a high-style crime thriller, The Departed, won. It was an anomaly then; would Oscar really do it twice in a row?

5. Oprah.

6. It was the year of "should I keep/have a baby?"—4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days; Knocked Up; Starting Out in the Evening; Waitress; Bella; Lake of Fire—and Juno is that trend's cutest little poster child.

As you can see from these succinct points, no other film could possibly win Best Picture except for Juno, the 96-minute comedy about teen pregnancy. Did I just type that?

The No Norbit Book

My Oscar obsession takes me many places. One place it will not take me is to the fatsuit extravaganza Norbit. I've composed a children's book (of a sort) as a valentine to the one feature-length Oscar nominee from 2007 that I will never delete from my obsessive spreadsheets.

3rd Annual Goatdog's Movies Oscar Contest

Yes, it's time for the third annual Goatdog's Movies Oscar Contest. Click on the image for the ballot. The prize, as always, is either a DVD of the Best Picture winner or a DVD of equivalent price. Entries are due by 5:00 CST on Friday, February 22, and I'll announce the winner on Monday, February 25.

The 72-Nomination Long Weekend

Since I have little to do but nap and complain and watch movies, I've decided to take a figurative bulldozer to the Oscars. The 10 films I've watched since Friday represent 72 nominations in various categories, leading me to develop the important new measure, Minutes Per Nomination (MPN), which leads to more efficient Oscar viewing. I chose MPN instead of NPM (nominations per minute) because I don't like decimal points, although some worked their way in anyway. I chose mostly the long, nomination-bogarting epics of the 1950s and 1960s, with stops along the way for remarkably good films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Hud. In descending order of MPN, here they are.

State Fair (1933): 96 minutes / 2 nominations = 48 MPN
Picture, Writing–Adaptation

Proof that they'd nominate just about anything for Best Picture back in the early days of Oscar, this anonymously agreeable countrified hoo-haw is about a rural family at the state fair. Yep, that's about it. Will Rogers frets about his moody pig, Louise Dresser frets about her pickles, and the kids, Janet Gaynor and Norman Foster, find big-city love with Lew Ayres and Sally Eilers. Even the pig gets in on the action. 2 goats

A Free Soul (1931): 91 minutes / 3 nominations = 30 MPN
Actor, Actress, Director

Norma Shearer looked dazzling in a series of gowns and snazzy little flapper outfits by Adrian (it's a crime that there wasn't a costume design category yet), but aside from a first, lighthearted scene, my god did she stink when she talked. She pains me, because I like her so much in some parts, but so little in others. Also-nominated director Clarence Brown let her indulge all of her worst tics: she squints like she's staring into the sun and packs in all the, er, vogueing she can (strike a grimace!), and many of her line readings were howlingly funny. Lionel Barrymore, who actually won Best Actor, is little better; his bag of tricks included just one, "drunk," which he used whether his character was drunk or not. Clark Gable was good, though, and he and Norma certainly made a fine-looking pair. 2 goats

Cleopatra (1963): 243 minutes / 9 nominations = 27 MPN
Picture, Actor, Cinematography, Editing, Original Score, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Costume Design, Sound, Visual Effects

The loudest thing about this epic was the mighty slap in the face that Oscar delivered; despite nine nominations including the big one, notably missing were its million dollar star Elizabeth Taylor, her high-profile lover Richard Burton, and Joseph Mankiewicz as either a writer or a director. It's the film without stars that was neither written nor directed! It's also a colossal bore, too long by half. Rex Harrison (who was nominated) was very good and Burton was pretty good, but Taylor's more petulant than queenly. At least some of the spectacle was suitably spectacular, especially Cleopatra's entrance into Rome. 2 goats

The High and the Mighty (1954): 147 minutes / 6 nominations = 24.5 MPN
Director, Supporting Actress X 2, Editing, Original Score, Original Song

Recent archaeological studies have pushed the origins of the modern big-budget disaster flick back as far as 1954, when John Wayne saved a planeload of passengers and their personal problems from fiery or watery death. All the elements were already set in stone: the pilot with a hidden yellow streak, the washed-up copilot with a troubled past, the cute kid, the boozy floozies, the tormented businessmen, even the token minorities. And, of course, the screaming and crying and Best Editing nomination. Dmitri Tiomkin's score won, but the oddball is an Original Song nomination for a song whose lyrics we never hear, not even during the closing credits. 2.5 goats

Seabiscuit (2003): 141 minutes / 7 nominations = 20 MPN
Picture, Cinematography, Editing, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Sound Mixing, Costume Design

By the time I'd recovered from being yanked around by the bridle by unnominated director Gary Ross's hopscotch history lesson-cum-character development, I was thoroughly annoyed by the cutesy cutaways and near-jump cuts the editing favors, the gauzy sun-dappled cinematography (according to this film and Cinderella Man, the Depression sure looked great!), and the tendency of the screenplay to have a character tell us, at the very end of a scene, what we should already have gathered. At least the races were shot well, except for the closeups, which looked like Tobey Maguire on an animatronic hobby horse. 2.5 goats

Doctor Zhivago (1965): 197 minutes / 10 nominations = 19.7 MPN
Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Costume Design, Adapted Screenplay, Original Score, Sound

This wasn't as bad as I'd expected it to be. It certainly spent a lot of its time (and money) flailing for epic status, but it was quite good in smaller moments—most of them including Rod Steiger, who deserved the Oscar nomination that Tom Courtenay received mistakenly. The biggest blight was Omar Sharif, the appeal of whom I just don't understand, having seen him in this film and Funny Girl recently. He doesn't seem to want to be good, or even noticed. 3 goats

Hud (1963): 112 minutes / 7 nominations = 16 MPN
Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Adapted Screenplay

The best film of 1963 wasn't nominated for the top honor; it settled for a slew of other nominations, among them Paul Newman's poisonous title turn as a sexy, jarringly amoral layabout. Patricia Neal's flinty, flirty pseudo-lead won a deserved Oscar and is probably among my top 10 winners. James Wong Howe's stunning, dusty photography won, but Tom Jones (!!!) stole most of the other awards that Hud deserved. One of the most glaring omissions was Elmer Bernstein's haunting, lonely score, which wasn't even nominated. 5 goats

Sons and Lovers (1960): 103 minutes / 7 nominations = 14.7 MPN
Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction/Set Decoration

This somewhat gelded adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's scandalous first novel is still pretty good, if only because the screenwriters were able to transfer some of the novel's pages and pages of self-examination into the mouths of the characters. Especially effective was the expansion of the father character (Trevor Howard, who plays what's clearly a supporting part but was up for lead anyway) and Dean Stockwell's relationship with the nominated Mary Ure, but the all-important mother obsession takes a backseat, as does Paul's oddly spiritual relationship with Miriam. 3.5 goats

My Fair Lady (1964): 171 minutes / 12 nominations = 14.2 MPN

Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Costume Design, Adapted Score, Sound

This wasn't nearly as painful as I'd been led to believe. I can't quite believe that Rex Harrison won Best Actor for his one-note growl, and there were several superior films they could have lavished a bunch of Oscars on, but this was moderately enjoyable. I loved the unnominated Audrey Hepburn until her big makeover, and Stanley Holloway was a lot of fun around the edges. The songs are great, even if their staging was often unimaginative (except the one at the horse track, which was brilliant). Still, one thing the film really screwed up was the ending: they've spent 170 minutes convincing us that nobody could like Henry Higgins, so why should we believe it when Eliza Doolittle decides to stick around? 3 goats

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969): 120 minutes / 9 nominations = 13.3 MPN
Director, Actress, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Editing, Costume Design, Art Direction/Set Decoration, Score of a Musical Picture, Adapted Screenplay

One of the bleakest films ever made, it's as if they rolled up all the desperation of the Great Depression, unleashed it in one big dance marathon, and then forgot to nominate one of the best films of the year for the big award. Jane Fonda's tough, desperate performance is probably one of the best of the 1960s, but she didn't win, nor did Susannah York. The only win was Gig Young's brave take on the heartless bastard of a host. The biggest question is for director Sydney Pollack: what the hell happened? You were really great once upon a time. Yowza. 4.5 goats

2007 Goaties: Stay Tuned for Updates

I couldn't think of anything to say on this blog that others haven't said more eloquently elsewhere, but Heath Ledger's death left me shaken. We've watched him grow from a pretty kid with promise into one of the best actors working, and I'm sad that on Oscar nomination mornings to come, we won't wake up to hear his name listed.

Instead of attempting to write in-depth appreciations of all of my award winners (we saw how well that worked out last year, when I never got around to finishing them), I'm going to post shorter blurbs about them, with the intention of writing less about more films. I'll post them here as I get them done, so check back over the next few days or weeks as I complete them. Recent additions (1/26): Cinematography, Visual Effects

I haven't seen nearly as many films as certain other critics, but I'm faced with the prospect of having to wait until March or later for the chance to see the rest of the award-worthy films. Exactly how good is Lust, Caution? Does Benicio Del Toro give a better lead performance in Things We Lost in the Fire than my pick for Best Actor? I guess I'll find out in March. But for now...

Musical Moment: As a midnight thunderstorm rages outside and Christina Ricci cowers (no longer chained to the radiator) at his feet, Samuel L. Jackson thrashes out the title song of Black Snake Moan on an electric guitar whose overfuzzed tones intermittently turn tinny and metallic when the power flashes on and off. It's the climactic scene in Craig Brewer's deliciously overheated slice of southern-fried ham, and it's about the power of the blues to drive out your demons. Can I get an amen?

Original Song: OK, whereas I think that several of the songs from Once were among the year's best, including the soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated "Falling Slowly" but also the better song "When Your Mind's Made Up," I think that the brilliant "PoP! Goes My Heart" from the deservedly underseen Music and Lyrics deserves mention here. It manages to perfectly parodize 1980s synth-pop while actually being a great example of the music it's picking on. Unfortunately, it's also catchy as hell, and I expect the chorus to be stuck in my head for a few days now.

Supporting Actor: Hal Holbrook is getting all the critical raves, but I think he was outshined in Into the Wild by a non-actor named Brian Dierker, a guide and white water rafter who Sean Penn convinced to appear in the film as a middle-aged hippie who trades relationship advice and quiet companionship with Emile Hirsch. Dierker, speaking unscripted lines and guided by one of the best actors alive, brings an easy, unaffected realism to the role; his scenes with Hirsch, who I didn't particularly like, and Keener, who I did, are the best things about the film.

Foreign Language Film: Christian Mungiu's harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a nightmarish odyssey into totalitarianism. Anamaria Marinca gives one of the best performances of the year as a young woman who attempts to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate; guided by Oleg Mutu's unforgiving and unsteady handheld camera, we follow her into a hell that tests the limits of her friendship and our ability to keep from screaming and running out of the theater.

Original Score: Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood's modernist score for There Will Be Blood was recently disqualified for Oscar, and I'm sure a Goatie is a small consolation prize. His score's shrieking strings and droning chords, like Daniel Day-Lewis's iconic performance and Paul Thomas Anderson's whiz-bang shot compositions, demands to be noticed; it calls attention to itself both as something inseperable from the film it inhabits and as something apart from the film.

Costumes: From Jennifer Garner's J. Jill pastels to Jason Bateman's layered, ratty Soundgarden t-shirts to Michael Cera's bright yellow too-shorts and headbands to Allison Janney's softer side of Sears to J.K. Simmons's worn Carharts, Monique Prudhomme's costumes for Juno work as canny character statements, culminating in Ellen Page's riotous rag-picked ensembles.

Documentary: Zoo addresses its topic—men who have sex with horses—elliptically, by refusing to explain it, by almost refusing the very idea that it can be explained to someone who doesn't share that particular desire. There's an enigmatic scene in which one of the actors in the reenactments explains how he connected to his role by thinking of a particularly bad accident he witnessed; I was struck by what a tenuous and false connection he was creating, and I realized that the film was telling us the same thing: you think you can get your head around this, but you're wrong.

Actor: I sure hope there's still room on Daniel Day-Lewis's mantel after awards season is done. As much as I hate to jump on anyone's bandwagon, I can't deny that his performance as avarice personified in There Will Be Blood is such a staggering achievement that calling it one of the greatest male performances of all time doesn't seem so crazy, although I'd rather wait and see how it holds up after a few years.

Visual Effects: As much as I disliked the movie, I can't deny how great 300's visual effects were; it's one of the first films in which the vaguely incorrect feel I usually get from large-scale CGI (e.g., Gladiator, The Golden Compass) was an aid instead of a hindrance: from the giant beasties to the giant Rodrigo Santoro to all those gouts of blood, the general unreality of the effects (which, in fact, looked more "realistic," if that's a useful word here, than anything in The Transformers) added to the comic-book feel of the film. Because there were more visual effects artists listed in the cast than there were Spartans in the battle (or Persians, for that matter), I can't single out any one person's achievement.

Cinematography: Many people (including me, for a long time) think great cinematography is about pretty pictures, but it's really about finding the right images to tell the story. No film did that better this year than 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Oleg Mutu's wavering handheld camera, so often held in long, shaky, unbroken closeups on Anamaria Marinca's face as she builds the web of half-truths and evasions that will allow her to complete her mission and travels deeper into this film's hell, both gives us special access to Marcina's thoughts and cuts us off from others', adding to the increasing isolation that she feels (and we feel). Highlights (if the definition of "highlight" contains the phrase "made me want to run out of the theater") include the almost-surreal dinner party at Marinca's boyfriend's house and the final dash through Bucharest's labyrinthine, poorly-lit streets.

Earlier: Best Supporting Actress Jennifer Garner
Sooner: I'll get back to you on that
Later: The other 7 categories

The Leading Critics

According to this Reuters story, Leonard Maltin, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone), and, um, Richard Roeper are not only "leading critics," they're the leading critics. God help us.

And they're "almost unanimous" in choosing Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie as their best actor and actress, respectively, of the year. "Almost," in this case, means "not really," as Maltin has Day-Lewis and Marion Cotillard, Travers has Johnny Depp and Christie, and Roeper goes out on a limb and picks an assortment of eligible male leading performers (Day-Lewis, Depp, and George Clooney) and then Laura Linney.

I'm going out on a limb and saying that I agree with the leading critics totally, "totally" meaning "here and there." It's good to be on the winning team. I await the arrival of my "leading critic" badge.

2007 in Review: Best Rentals/Revivals

I watch twice as many older films as new releases, and 2007 was a banner year on my couch and at the revival house. I saw four of my top ten as homework for Edward Copeland's survey of the top 100 foreign films of all time, and others resulted from my Oscar obsession (#7), a gift of a membership at Chicago's Siskel Center (#4), and my too-infrequent trips to the revival house in my own neighborhood (#8).

It physically hurt to have to leave off such films as Andrei Tarkovsky's poetic Andrei Rublev (USSR, 1969), Réne Clément's deeply disturbing Forbidden Games (France, 1952), the sublimely religious The Song of Bernadette (1943), and Charles Burnett's devilish To Sleep with Anger (1990). But it's a top ten list, and I couldn't quite figure out how to shove fourteen films into it.

10. The Narrow Margin (1952). Studio hack Richard Fleischer's minimalist noir is like a hypodermic full of pure suspense jabbed right into the heart, or something equally thrilling (but maybe less painful). A good cop has to shepherd a mob moll cross-country to testify, but which of the beggar's banquet of tough guys on the train is the assassin sent to kill her? Maybe they all are. It's surely the best suspense film set on a train, despite what you may have heard about a certain portly British director.

9. The Conformist (Italy, 1970). This fragmented masterpiece suggests that Tarantino wasn't just watching kung fu movies. The story of a regular guy who's so driven by the need to fit in that he ends up a Fascist hit man is driven to dizzying heights of directorial and photographic audacity by the 29-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci and his brilliant cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. This must be the coolest film ever made.

8. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). A three-hour lullabye to the film industry, this documentary looks at how Hollywood has chosen to depict its hometown. Its hundreds of movie clips are only the start of the fun; director Thom Anderson also provides a smart analysis of the interplay between architecture and cinema and the ways that films have rewritten the city's history. Most intriguing to me, however, is the complete absence of movies about the movie industry, but I guess that would be fodder for another three-hour documentary.

7. Shanghai Express (1932). Most of Josef von Sternberg's talkies leave me cold: they're so frosty and beautiful, with stylized mannequins who stand around talking about love and devotion but not demonstrating any of it. This one bowled me over because it combined von Sternberg's brilliantly realized visual flourishes with some real, human feeling. Dietrich was never again so divine as she was here.

6. Strangers on a Train (1951). OK, but this one takes place only partly on a train. Less than The Narrow Margin, at any rate. Hitchcock's masterpiece (which may be my favorite of his films) is filled with signature touches, my favorite being the tennis match. The audacity of how long that sequence takes is just one example of the Master of Suspense's mastery of timing. Who else would dare drag it out that long, and to such delicious effect?

5. Pickpocket (France, 1959). My first Bresson film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His stripped-bare version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment retains all the angst and grand ideas about supermen as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition; it could be that Michel is just blowing smoke to cover his addiction. The characters stand at obtuse angles from each other; they're only truly alive during the balletic pickpocketing sequences.

4. War and Peace (USSR, 1968). It's the biggest and most expensive film ever made, and will probably retain those titles forever (it helps when you can use most of the Red Army for a single battle scene), but the scale and spectacle are only part of this sweeping epic's charms. Sergei Bondarchuk is able to balance all that delirious excess with the sensitive performances of his sprawling cast, especially Lyudmila Savelyeva as Natasha and Bondarchuk himself as Pierre.

3. Come and See (USSR, 1985). Where War and Peace showed us war in all of its possible permutations, this nightmarish down-the-rabbit-hole film is about only one: the "hell" part of "war is hell." It's the story of one patriotic kid who joins the Soviet resistance against the Nazi invaders during World War II, and pays for his patriotism with his sanity.

2. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Germany, 1974). My first Fassbinder film, and why did it take me so long to get around to him? His reinterpretation of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows is one of the most beautifully depressing films I've ever seen, the story of how love triumphs over everything except our own pettiness and prejudice. Excuse me while I get some tissues.

1. Persona (Sweden, 1966). I'm not positive that I could explain more than a scene or two of Ingmar Bergman's modernist masterpiece; all I know is that it's emotionally shattering, an almost religious cinematic experience—religious in the sense that it's like developing an intimate relationship with something that's unknowable. It defies interpretation, or at least my fumbling attempts at it. I think it's one of the five or six greatest films ever made.

2007 Goaties: Best Supporting Actress

StinkyLulu has prompted me to get a head start on my 2007 awards with the second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon. Check over there for more Supporting Actress goodness.

Ellen Page's much-lauded lead performance left me cold—anything she did, Thora Birch did better in Ghost World—but what saved Juno for me was the veritable cornucopia of supporting work from such people as Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Allison Janney, and, especially, and especially unlikely, Jennifer Garner. I'd previously dismissed Garner as a low-talent pretty face that, in fact, isn't all that pretty. (I believe that I wrote a blog post about how unattractive she is. I believe I quoted, with approval, someone calling her a "Picasso guppy.")

But my god, I take it all back: Garner is brilliant, or at least she's brilliant here, with the right part. She gives the best supporting performance of 2007, slyly toying with our impressions of a character who starts out as an easy mark: the baby- and decor-obsessed frigid suburban yuppie housewife. Cue the guffaws, especially as the film presents her as little more than a Baby Gap monster, a comic foil for the thwarted ambitions of her wanna-be rock-star husband (Bateman). But the screenplay's finest quality is its ability to take these easy marks and flesh them out, making us gradually discard our first, or even second or third, impressions. Subtly, and slowly, Garner opens Vanessa up, turning the joke inside out.

The film first introduces her through shots of her hands, smoothing coverlets and arranging flowers; if the shot had opened up to reveal that the hands belonged to an employee in a particularly high-end home furnishings store, it wouldn't have been surprising. Garner's obsessed with creating the perfect household: anything untidy (like everything Bateman brought from his former life) must be hidden. When things don't fit her domestic fantasy ("You found us in the penny saver?"), it throws her, and we see the anxiety that knits her life together. Most of that anxiety comes from her desire to have a child; Garner helps us, over the course of the film, to understand her obsession with outward perfection—her wholesale purchase of the American suburban dream—as a manifestation of her thwarted desire to have a kid. I can't have this one thing that would make me whole, she reasons, so I'll take all of these other things that give the illusion of wholeness.

It's when that anxiety becomes apparent that Garner really shines. I felt little a twinge at her reaction to Juno's careless "Lucky it's not you" comment; that twinge grew sharper during the scene at the mall when, at first, the baby won't kick for her (she interprets this, in an instant, as confirmation of the cosmic curse against her), and then the uncertain "do I deserve this?" joy when she finally feels something. And that twinge turned into a punch in the heart at the end, when, still anxious and uncertain, she asks Janney "How do I look?", her new baby in her arms.

So Jennifer Garner has demonstrated incredible range here—an ability to play the part for laughs, and then to gradually flesh out the screenplay's skeleton. She succeeds, better than the woman in the spotlight, in selling the film's underlying heart.

Runners-Up: From Todd Haynes's messy I'm Not There, there's the obvious choice of Cate Blanchett, so gawky and adolescent and androgynous that she was the best Dylan imitator of the bunch, but there's also Charlotte Gainsbourg, so adept and moving as the thankless and unthanked deserted wife in the "this is the part of the biopic when there's domestic strife" part of the film. And let's not forget Tilda Swinton, elevating her role in Michael Clayton above the casual misogyny of the part and letting us watch her going through the process of building a character as the film progresses.

Not Dead, Just Nearly So

I had plans for blogging about all the year-end awards, my recent trip to San Francisco, and my giddifying attempts to watch all the 2007 movies I've missed along the way (I'm particularly fond of Black Snake Zoo and Before the Devil Knows You're on Horseback and Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Red Road), but I dot a told. Both my favorite art historian and I have been out of commission; we spent a nice New Year's Eve fitfully attempting to catch a few winks between coughing fits, and we're heading for Maine tomorrow, despite being still under the weather.

But when we get back, I'll plunge into these things I used to write, what are they called... movie reviews! And blog posts! My flight lands at 6:00 on Sunday, and by midnight I'll have a post ready for StinkyLulu's second annual Supporting Actress Blogathon on an unexpectedly moving performance from someone I've spent time dissing on this very blog.

1955 Supporting Actress Smackdown

Head over to Stinkylulu's place, where we're celebrating the 1955 Supporting Actress Smackdown. Join Brad of Criticlasm, Canadian Ken, Nathaniel of The Film Experience, Nick of the eponymous Flick Picks, Rburton of Adam Waldowski Doesn't Watch Non-Oscar Movies, and our gracious host, Stinkylulu, as we take a look at a youth movement of sorts.

But first, let's take a moment of silence to thank the Oscar gods for not nominating Betty Field, Susan Strasberg, or Rosalind Russell for their work in Picnic.

...

Because if they had, I would not be here today. Faced with the prospect of watching that meatball of a film again, I might have done myself harm, or declined to participate in this Smackdown. And readers, those are one and the same.

So, that youth movement. I'm stretching the term a little. The nominees are Betsy Blair in Marty, Peggy Lee in Pete Kelly's Blues, Marisa Pavan in The Rose Tattoo, Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden, and Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause. Blair was 32, a veteran of several films, but also a victim of the blacklist—maybe the first instance of a blacklisted star receiving an Oscar nomination. (Someone else can do the research.) Lee was 35, a ten-year veteran of fame as a singer but appearing in her third and last film, and looking mighty relieved by the end of this one that she wouldn't have to do it again. (That's a lie—her expression never changes, even when she has to go crazy.) Pavan was 23, appearing in her fifth film but her first big role. Van Fleet was 41, a stage veteran winning an Oscar in her first film and helping herald the new world order of Method acting in Hollywood. And Wood was just 17, a former child actress. Their average age is 29. Does that count?

I loved Van Fleet's performance the most, but it wasn't the punched-in-the-gut love I felt for Maureen Stapleton in my last foray into Supporting Actressness. (Just had to work in a plug for that marvellous performance.) It was more of a clinical love, an admiration of her craft without the emotion. And yet I gave her the same rating. Rankings sure are capricious.

Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg

This post is part of Nathaniel's Montgomery Clift Blog-a-Thon, which is occurring today over at The Film Experience Blog.

Forty-one years after his birth, thirteen years after he burst onto American movie screens in The Search and Red River, five years after a near-fatal car accident left his face scarred, and five years before his death, Montgomery Clift took the stand in Stanley Kramer's post-WWII courtoom epic Judgment at Nuremberg. He plays Rudolph Petersen, a simpleminded man who had been forcibly sterilized by the Nazi regime.

The parallels are perhaps too easy for comfort: Clift plays a broken, semi-coherent man stuck in front of hundreds of people and asked to relive his emasculation; Clift was a broken man whose physical and mental deterioration, helped along by hearty drug and alcohol addictions, caused him to flub take after take. Stanley Kramer later wrote about Clift's difficulty with his lines:

"Finally I said to him, 'Just forget the damn lines Monty. Let's say you're on the witness stand. The prosecutor says something to you, then the defense attorney bitterly attacks you, and you have to reach for a word in the script. That's all right. Go ahead and reach for it. Whatever the word may be, it doesn't really matter. Just turn to [Spencer] Tracy on the bench whenever you feel the need, and ad lib something. It will be all right because it will convey the confusion in your character's mind.' He seemed to calm down after this. He wasn't always close to the script, but whatever he said fitted in perfectly, and he came through with as good a performance as I had hoped."

Unlike in his other post-accident films, there's no effort to hide his various maladies. Instead of favoring his unscarred right profile, Kramer's creeping camera executes its typical (and eventually annoying, but not by this point) slow circle around him, starting with a frontal closeup and moving to the right, showing off Clift's twitching left cheek and slightly sagging left eyebrow. As it creeps around him, we see that his head is nodding a bit, and his skeletal hands are twitching. How much of this is acting, and how much of it was unconscious?

Whatever it was, he's riveting. His seven-minute scene begins with him walking, self-consciously upright, to the witness stand before hesitating, in a curious pose that reminded me of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, before sitting down. Under the gentle questioning of the prosecuting attorney (Richard Widmark), he's composed, recounting the story of his trial and sentence, tiptoeing around the specifics of his forced operation. His wary face melts into childish pleasure when the audience or the judge (Spencer Tracy) shows approval, but for the most part he's closed up. But his composure shatters under the relentless cross-examination of the defense attorney (Maximilian Schell), whose theory of defense—essentially a version of the morally repugnant "we were just following orders"—holds that the defendants, all judges accused of enforcing immoral laws, were in fact justified in ordering his sterilization because it was the law of the land to sterilize "mental defectives."

Clift starts getting "fuzzy," for lack of a better word. His right eye seems to brighten, then to glaze over; he slumps further in his chair, almost hiding behind the sparse protection of the microphone, and several times has to remind himself to sit up straight. His shoulders hunch, and as Schell's questions agitate him further, he loses his tenuous cool: his movements become more exaggerated as he shouts about the essential unfairness of his treatment and Schell's insinuations about his mother; ironically, the physical symptoms I mentioned above disappear, the quivering and unconscious movements replaced by strong gestures. His responses become incoherent, and his breakdown, a combination of a spirited defense of his mother and a cry of anguish at the way he was treated, is difficult to watch.

Schell takes the fact that Petersen is proved to be not much smarter than a child as a win for the defense, because German law at the time said that it was right to sterilize him. But Clift's performance helps hammer home the point of the scene, which is that such a defense is an immoral sham. The horror this lost, confused man-child experienced in a courtroom a dozen years before is indistinguishable from the horror he's facing on the stand today, except that there was no chance at justice in the Nazi court. His testimony is helping to achieve some today, not that it's any consolation to him.

Al Gore's Oscar

In the wake of Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize, lots of news outlets have been mentioning other things he won.

Reuters: ...winning an Oscar in 2007 for his documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Times of India: ...and earned Gore an Oscar.

Times of London: Mr Gore had already picked up an Oscar for his climate change documentary...

Fox News: Al Gore now has a Nobel Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy.

CNN Money: The former vice president, Oscar-winner and now Nobel Peace Prize recipient...

Telegraph: Just after Gore won an Oscar for his global warming documentary...

And so on. But.

Al Gore did not win an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. Davis Guggenheim won an Oscar for his film about Al Gore. Just because he invited Gore up to the podium to make an acceptance speech doesn't mean Gore won anything. (At least that night.) The award goes to the director of the winning film, not to its subject. If the latter were the case, Michelangelo, Albert Schweitzer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Frost, and Robert S. McNamara would have Oscars. And you know who else would have an Oscar?

That's right. Hitler.

CIFF: Control

The Chicago International Film Festival kicked off this week, and for the first time in the six years I've lived in Chicago, I'm able to see more than one or two movies. I have tickets to seven, and I hope to provide up-to-the-minute updates, but, you know, I lack initiative. We'll see.

First up was Control, a disappointingly by-the-numbers biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, played here by Sam Riley. On the verge of stardom, Curtis committed suicide at the age of 23, leaving behind a wife, a baby daughter, and a band that became New Order. We've already seen much of his life story, which consistutes much of the first half of the superior Michael Winterbottom film 24 Hour Party People. Despite expanding on that half-hour or so into feature length, director Anton Corbijn, working from a screenplay based on Curtis's wife's memiors, doesn't manage to give us any more insight into the moody singer.

Read the full review.

The William Wyler Blogathon

Welcome to the William Wyler Blogathon headquarters. The blogathon, which occurred between September 21 and 23, was a rousing success. I want to thank everybody who participated, either in posts or in comments. Now that things have wrapped up, I have time to read everything, which is the best part of hosting.

In my announcement post (feel free to steal some of those images), I said "When I think of William Wyler, I think of the Oscars." So of course when it came to writing something for this event, I chose two early, non-Oscar films: 1929's part-talkie The Love Trap and 1932's wholesome Tom Brown of Culver.

The Participants (in order of appearance):

• operator_99 at Allure looks at actresses in Wyler's late-1920s and pre-Code films.
• Jacqueline at Another Old Movie Blog discusses Wyler's use of moments of silence.
• Emma at All About My Movies investigates The Children's Hour.
• Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee and More Coffee compares The Love Trap with another early talkie romantic comedy.
• Shane at Rocks That Move outs Wyler as an auteur.
• Shawn at Man With Towel drinks his way through How to Steal a Million.
• StinkyLulu makes a strong argument for Wyler's beatification.
• Bob at Forward to Yesterday finds it hard to ignore the anti-neocon stance of The Big Country.
• James at Rants of a Diva loves Babs in Funny Girl.
• Nick at Nick's Flick Picks was so inspired by The Good Fairy that he wrote his first full review since Wyler won his first Oscar.
• Odienator at Eddie's Blog-a-Thon Board takes on Bette Davis's three films with Wyler.
• Glenn at Stale Popcorn has four clips of Babs in Funny Girl
• Hedwig at As Cool as a Fruitstand admires The Best Years of Our Lives
• Self-Styled Siren thinks Jezebel needs a reappraisal.
• Brad at Criticlasm has loved Funny Girl at least since he was eight.
• Justine at Beyond the Valley of the Cinephiles compares The Heiress with Roman Holiday.
• Mike at The Bargain Matinee takes a second look at The Children's Hour.
• John T. at The Many Rantings of John praises Wyler's use of quiet moments.
• Thom at Film of the Year flies in on the Memphis Belle.
• Lylee wants to know why The Big Country isn't hailed as a classic.
• And to wrap things up, Brian at Hell on Frisco Bay interviews Wyler's daughter, Judy Wyler Sheldon.
• And to wrap things up again, Noel at Critic After Dark brings us Filipino versions of The Heiress and The Collector.

The Love Trap (1929)

William Wyler's third feature after graduating from his apprenticeship in Universal's two- and five-reel Westerns starts out as a sparkling romantic comedy; had it stayed that way, it might deserve discussion as one of the better sophisticated comedies of the late silent period. But the sound juggernaut started with Al Jolson's boastful "You ain't heard nothin' yet," delivered two years earlier in The Jazz Singer, was forcing a dramatic shift in audience tastes, and studios added talking sequences to films already in production or recently released. Just over midway through the slim 72-minute running time, Universal's sound revolution dampens The Love Trap's sparkle by amping up the melodrama when it turns up the volume. What started out as a very good film ends up fair-to-middling because the actors aren't up to delivering dialogue that in turn doesn't measure up.

Star Laura La Plante and her husband, director William Seiter, had final approval on choice of director for this film, so they screened Wyler's previous film, the comedy The Shakedown; Wyler snuck into the projection booth and guffawed loudly during every joke, hoping that La Plante and Seiter would be convinced that everyday people like projectionists thought he was a comedic genius. It must have worked. La Plante plays Evelyn, a chorus girl whose dancing is so out of step that her stage director uses her as an example of what not to do before asking that she perform "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," adding that she shouldn't stop until she gets there. She dabbles innocently in the escort-for-hire racket at a swank party, but the devious and amorous attentions of one Guy Emory (Robert Ellis) have her running out wearing little more than a wrap.

The screenplay pokes fun at mawkish "You must pay the rent! I cannot pay the rent!" melodrama when she ends up evicted, sitting in her settee on the curbside as rain pours down. But every cloud carries a silver lining, and this time it's in the form of the wealthy and handsome Peter Harrington (Neil Hamilton), who takes pity on her, marshalling dozens of cabs to save her drenched furniture and manufacturing every excuse to remain in her company, even to the point of driving all night, ending up in the middle of nowhere, fighting off the furious cabdrivers, and eventually marrying her. Then comes trouble in the form of Peter's disapproving mother and sister (Clarissa Selwynne and Rita La Roy), who can't believe Peter would marry some tart from Squeedunk, Illinois. Things get worse when Judge Harrington (Norman Trevor) arrives; the Judge, Peter's uncle and head of the family, was at the aforementioned party and saw enough to get the wrong idea about Evelyn.

Then the talking starts.

As is often the case, the stereotypical image of early-talkie actors crowded around the microphone hidden in a flower pot and delivering their lines to a motionless camera (as parodied in Singin' in the Rain) proves to be inaccurate. There isn't a marked difference in cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton's camera's fluidity, and some of the most dramatic shot setups come during the talking sequences. No, the real problem (which Singin' in the Rain did get right) is that the actors, who were fine, even wonderful in the silent half of the film, aren't up to the challenges of sound. At the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it) of this list is Laura La Plante, whose line readings are cackle-inducingly awful at times. She talks so slowly, and emphasizes so carefully, that it's as if she's reading from cue cards—and maybe she is, since she's not used to having to memorize dialogue. It doesn't help that she seems to dramatically increase the amount of mad gesturing and arm-waving that people tend to associate with silent acting (but which is notably absent from the first, silent half of this film). At one point, Judge Harrington tells her, "You're quite an actress," but he's responding to the wrong scenes; her best scenes are long gone by this point. More correct is her husband, who tells her just before the final fadeout that she's a terrible actress, and sadly he's not far off. The other actors, who are more or less adequate once they have to start talking, are strangled by the increasing melodrama of the screenplay, which abandons for too long the lighthearted tone of the first half. It recovers somewhat by the end, but La Plante's obvious performance and the sorry dialogue have damaged the film too much by this point to save it.

The last scene of the film looks good on paper: Evelyn tries to change the Judge's mind, and when that fails, decides to take him down with her. Had it stuck to silence (a misnomer, of course: there's a rich and witty score by Joseph Cherniavsky that all but disappears when the talking starts, a victim of early sound recording limitations), it might well have been hilarious; La Plante's increasingly fervent gesticulations would have argued against the self-seriousness of the dialogue, and La Plante, from all appearances a fine comedienne, would have been free to sell the comedy without having to worry about her lines. I think her performance has a lot to do with Wyler's lack of experience with directing dialogue: I haven't seen all of his films, but I can't remember any really bad performances in them—"90-Take Willy" wouldn't allow such a thing.

[A note of caution on using biographies for research: Jan Herman, author of A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, thinks Peter is a taxi driver, and that Judge Harrington "finally realizes she's not so bad after all" (p. 87). Apparently he didn't see the film.]

Tom Brown of Culver (1932)

In film after film of the pre-Code era, the generation who lived through the War to End All Wars looked backward in horror and forward with prescient fear. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) is the best-known and most powerful antiwar film of this era, but it wasn't alone. The following year saw The Last Flight, about a group of aviators drifting through Paris on a cloud of alcohol, trying desperately to forget their experiences. In I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Paul Muni is unable to sell his Croix de Guerre to buy a meal because the pawnbroker's case is already full of medals; and in Heroes for Sale (1933), Richard Barthelmess returns from Europe a morphine-addicted wreck. The twin aviation films The Eagle and the Hawk and Ace of Aces (both 1933) featured protagonists destroyed emotionally by their newfound ability to kill.

So I was surprised to find in William Wyler's filmography a pre-Code film that can't exactly be called pro-war, but lacks the antipathy of many other pre-Code films. The circumstances behind Tom Brown of Culver decreed that it be more rah-rah than the films I discussed above. Universal's intention was to make "a wholesome, virile picture to counteract the sensational gin-and-jazz pictures that were so sadly misrepresenting American youth" (quoted in Jan Herman, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, New York: Putnam, p. 107). Instead of the dissolution and misery that other screen soldiers experienced in the early 1930s, Tom Brown finds self-respect and a direction for his life in the Culver Military Academy.

The titular Tom Brown (played, oddly, by an actor named Tom Brown), attempting to earn some money in an open boxing event, is spotted by an Army major (Sidney Toler) who takes pity on him, especially after he discovers that his father, an army surgeon, earned a posthumous Medal of Honor. Tom isn't particularly proud of the medal—echoing Paul Muni, he says "What good is it? Try buying grub with one."—and he'd rather have had a father around to raise him. The colonel gets him a job at a lunch counter run by one of Brown Sr.'s army buddies (Slim Summerville, playing someone named Slim), and later arranges for him to receive a scholarship to the Culver Military Academy, where Tom becomes the archetype of the surly, rebellious student. He won't march in formation, he won't shine his shoes, and he belittles the other cadets for their patriotic fervor. But after a fight with a fellow cadet, Randolph (Ben Alexander), Tom gets his act together and starts to respect the military, finally showing some pride in his father's actions. The film's best scene occurs in Memorial Hall when Ralph reverently shows Tom a picture of his own dead father, and Tom shyly pulls Brown Sr.'s Medal of Honor out of his pocket.

From here on out, the film is defined by radical and often unprompted changes in characters' behavior, especially after Tom discovers that his father (H.B. Warner) was a deserter and is still alive. This causes him to doubt his newfound love for military school—but why? And Ralph, after going AWOL to see a pinup starlet, experiences a dramatic shift, turning in the space of one scene into the surly, rebellious kid he'd railed against when that kid was Tom—but why? But the biggest "but why?" comes when the Army brass find out about Brown Sr.'s desertion and pooh-pooh it away—he witnessed such carnage that he fled, a victim of shell shock, which isn't necessarily so crazy, but it's dropped into the film as almost an afterthought.

Despite the explanation for Dr. Brown's behavior, there's no effort to project from his experiences to any general statement on war. He had a rough time, sure, but these things happen, and the script manages to tie everything into a neat little bow with a rousingly patriotic message. This message, along with the screen image of the Culver Academy, was guaranteed: the studio shot much of its footage at the real Culver Academy, and the superintendent of the school had final approval of the film, making such demands as the elimination of hazing scenes from the final cut. I realize that I haven't seen every film made in the early 1930s, and there are likely fewer films that take a strong antiwar stance than there are films that don't register an opinion on the subject, but it's interesting that the antiwar films are the ones that are remembered.

Wyler wasn't excited about the project; he wrote to his brother that "it will make a lot of money.... It's not artistic in any way but purely commercial in subject and treatment, maybe a little too much so" (quoted in Herman, p. 107). He had already earned his reputation as a director who shoots entirely too many takes, so when filming ran behind schedule because of bad weather, the studio brass naturally assumed that "Ninety-Take Willy" had violated their direct orders limiting the number of takes a director could request. But the film was completed almost on schedule, and it was a critical and financial success.

(I can't believe I didn't mention that this film features near-cameos by such famous and should-be-famous Hollywood players as Eugene Pallette, Andy Devine, Tyrone Power, and Alan Ladd.)

Slapstick at the Altar

In honor of four months of wedded bliss, and as part of the spectacular Slapstick Blog-a-Thon hosted by Thom at Film of the Year, I thought I'd profile a handful of slapstick weddings and near-weddings: one from an unlikely director and one with an unlikely straight man, one featuring my favorite unheralded comedian and one featuring perhaps the best-known comedy pair in slapstick, and one unfunny, derivative snooze.

Balked at the Altar (1908)

When one thinks of slapstick, D.W. Griffith might be toward the bottom of the list of people who spring to mind, somewhere between Chester A. Arthur and Laurence Olivier. But Griffith, in his early days at Biograph, directed at least one film that fits the slapstick mold, and perhaps helped establish some of the film genre's conventions: 1908's Balked at the Altar. The scenario involves a young woman's attempts to snag a husband—any husband. She makes eyes at every man who passes by her doorstep (except the "elderly fat black man"; more on that later), and when that fails, her pappy journeys to town to recruit a likely suitor. When he brings the lucky guy home and then produces a shotgun to seal the deal, the new groom goes along with it until the crucial moment when he apparently yells "I don't" and leaps out the nearest stained-glass window. Thus commences a fall-down, drag-out chase in which the wedding party attempts to recapture the groom and finish the ceremony.

There's little here that screams "Griffith" or "first genius of American film"; there aren't any directorial flourishes, aside from one instance when a woman offscreen seems to wave her hand in front of the camera, which was the closest any of the actors get to the camera. There are no closeups (indeed, no shots that show less than the actors' full lengths), and the film is badly deteriorated, so it's nearly impossible to tell what anyone looks like, but most people of consequence have comical identifying traits that survive the ravages of age: the bride-to-be wears her hair in a summer-squash-shaped formation atop her head; the reluctant groom minces around, elbows cocked, and has a pointy beard; and the "elderly fat black man" is clearly a white guy in blackface wearing a pillow strapped around his stomach. This racist caricature seems to exist only to provide a running gag in which an older white lady beats him up at every opportunity.

The chase scene is something Mack Sennett would have been proud of producing in his Keystone days (and in fact, Sennett appears in this film, although I'm not sure in what role; Griffith appears too, but again, all the faces are washed out). The wedding party tumbles out of the church like clowns from a fire engine, and each phase of the chase is defined by some obstacle they must overcome: a wooden fence and the two boys lolling against it, a steep incline and the drunk trying to sleep it off at the bottom, and finally the tree where they bring their quarry to bay.

That Little Band of Gold (1915)

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle starred alongside Mabel Normand in dozens of Keystone comedies in the teens. In many of them they were married, but in this one, they get married, thus qualifying the film for my completely arbitrary category. Within the first three minutes, Fatty proposes in the back of a cab, she accepts joyfully, they get hitched at the courthouse, and then she's waiting in front of her mirror, tearfully, for her wastrel husband to come home. Which he does, drunk and falling down. Fatty Arbuckle has one of the best "drunk" walks in film history: the top of his body stays mostly still, as if he were sober, but his legs twitch fitfully, making it look like he has to take multiple steps to cover the same ground as one sober step.

Mabel and her disapproving mother (and she has a lot to disapprove of—she catches Fatty fondling the help, and he continues to do so as she lectures him) force the big guy to take them to the opera, but as soon as they're in their seats Fatty is causing trouble: sneezing loudly, laughing at the funny-looking singers, unbuttoning his pants to get comfortable, and making pantomime plans with Ford Sterling, who occupies a box across the auditorium, to sneak off with the two buxom beauties Ford has in tow. The four end up at a restaurant where the furious Ford has to watch Fatty woo the woman they both want (Ethel Madison).

I was surprised to see Fatty as essentially the straight man. He cedes the screen to Ford Sterling, whose pointy beard, wagging eyebrows, and grimaces make him look like the kind of guy who'd tie a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. There's not a lot of physical comedy involved; I was expecting repeated scenes of a drunken Arbuckle falling down, but he apparently wanted to go in a different direction here. The most interesting thing about the film (which is stellar throughout) is the almost self-referential nature of some of the jokes. Early on, when Arbuckle is about to get dressed for his night out, his butler points at the camera and Arbuckle slams a door in our faces. And I think the opera scenes were shot at a real opera, with an audience of civilians instead of extras. When Fatty and Mabel sit down in their box, people in nearby seats point at them in surprise; you can see at least one person mouthing "Fatty Arbuckle." Similarly, when Ford Sterling sits down, people point and stare at him. Later in the restaurant, many of the other patrons are staring at the foursome and the camera, but the line between civilian and actor blurs when some of them get involved in the escalating conflict over Ethel Madison's affections. I suppose these were "plants" of film folks among the patrons.

The only moment of "traditional" slapstick violence is a tad shocking, given the generally tame feel of the rest of the film. At the end of their sojourn at the restaurant, before Mabel and mom can drag Fatty away, he grabs a champagne bottle and smashes it over Sterling's head. Because of the muted comedy to this point, it almost feels out of place, like a real person was smashing a real champagne bottle over a real head, and maybe real blood would follow. Of course Sterling short-circuits any such thought with some patented grimacing and gesticulating, but for just a second, it felt like the goodwill was gone.

His Wooden Wedding (1925)

I chose this topic mainly because I wanted a chance to write about my favorite slapstick short, which is this Leo McCarey-directed Charley Chase two-reeler. A well-to-do man (Chase) is about to get married when his best man (Fred DeSilva) slips him a note warning him that his bride-to-be (Katherine Grant) has a wooden leg. Charley is horrified, and who wouldn't be? At least, in this film, that is. Of course, right at that moment (it is Friday the 13th, after all), she sprains her ankle, causing a distinct limp that seems like proof of woodenness to Charley. When he gets a splinter from a cane while attempting to verify empirically the presence of lumber under her dress, he's convinced, and runs off in a fright, consoling himself with a large bottle of brandy. Of course, all his best man wants is the famous Dhulip Diamond, an heirloom that's been in Charley's family for years and is now perched on Grant's finger. I won't go into how it ends up stashed in Charley's top hat aboard a steamer bound for the South Seas as Grant and her frantic father chase them down in a yacht.

The comedic sequences, much like Buster Keaton's "trajectories," work as self-contained gags but also feed into the next routine in logical ways (well, in the film's logic, at least). Thus DeSilva's attempt to knock Charley's top hat off to retrieve the diamond runs into Charley's experiment with tossing hats into the wind aboard the steamer, which in turn segues smoothly into Charley's effort to free the diamond from inside the dress of a homely woman, which culminates in an uproarious dance sequence where Charley teaches her energetic, wiggly dances, hoping to force the diamond to fall out of her dress, with unintended consequences.

Chase is my favorite silent comedian, partly because few have heard of him and I can sound like a serious film nerd, and partly because I really love him. Mostly the latter. His career in front of and behind the camera lasted from the early teens, when often supported bigger stars such as Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin (he appears in That Little Band of Gold as a ticket-taker), until his death in 1940 at the age of 47. He was a graceful acrobat who, like Chaplin and Keaton, translates his grace into elaborate physical comedy. Many of his shorts start with him making an embarrassing decision that he spends the rest of the film attempting to make up for, in increasingly absurd situations. I like that he isn't afraid of coming across as a jerk, like he is here and in one of my other favorites, 1931's The Pip from Pittsburgh, in which he agrees to go on a blind double date but decides to make the experience as bad as possible for everyone involved. I've seen only a small fraction of the over 200 films he appeared in and the over 100 films he directed, but my esteem for him grows with every new discovery.

Oliver the Eighth (1934)

In this odd little short, which is funny for much of its running time but then squanders its promise in an abrupt ending, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy play barbers who both answer a personal ad from a rich widow seeking a new husband. Ollie cheats his partner by promising to mail his letter and then hiding it, but Stan comes along for the ride when the widow (a divine Mae Busch, vamping it up like Gloria Swanson 16 years later in Sunset Blvd.) chooses Oliver as her husband-to-be. Too bad for both of them that she's a deranged murderess who was slighted by a guy named Oliver and has vowed to exact her revenge on anyone bearing that name.

There's not a lot of traditional slapstick to the humor: poor Ollie gets bonked on the head several times, but only once is it part of a sustained gag. Most of the humor comes from pantomime (something the former silent film stars, including Busch, knew pretty well): Busch has a similarly deranged butler named Jitters (Jack Barty) who plays solitaire with invisible cards, does card tricks with those same cards, and serves an invisible dinner that Ollie and Stan are obliged to pretend to eat to avoid setting Jitters off. Laurel and Hardy are masters at delivering punchlines: it's sort of funny to play solitaire with invisible cards, but it's hilarious to cheat; the pantomimed dinner scene is funny, but it's hilarious when Stan, having knocked the invisible salt over, tosses an invisible pinch over his shoulder for luck.

As the ending approaches, Stan and Ollie are locked in a guest room as Busch prepares to murder them both. I was looking forward to a series of gags as they attempt to elude her and Jitters and escape from the house, but I suppose the operative word in "comedy short" is "short": having spent their two reels on setup, the payoff is necessarily disappointing.

Caught in the Act (1936)

My celebration of slapstick weddings ends on a sour note, as this Andy Clyde short is the only one that I actively disliked. There's little to recommend this film or Clyde's skills as a comedian. His entire shtick is that he's a relatively young man (44 years old here) playing a doddering old man. Thus, his ability to execute a tumble or jump in the air is supposed to be amusing. But Clyde (who went on to achieve fame of sorts as Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick in the 1940s) short-circuits everything by calling undue attention to himself, with far too many snorts, grunts, whimpers, and laughs.

In this film, he gets engaged to the energetic Esmerelda (Anne O'Neal) and sets off home to prepare for the big event, which is to happen the next morning. Distracted from his bath by a door-to-door salesman, he gets caught outside, naked but for a sheet wrapped around him. This is decidedly inconvenient, because there's a maniac named Jack the Kisser on the loose, who runs around wrapped in a sheet, kissing unsuspecting women. Andy quickly winds up in jail, handcuffed to the real Jack the Kisser (John T. Murray), who escapes, dragging the bewildered Andy with him.

John Murray steals the entire film as Jack the Kisser. He looks and sounds like a villain from a Warner Brothers cartoon, with waggling eyebrows, insane stares, and that mwua-ha-ha-ha laugh. Clyde himself only provides one big laugh, when the police administer a sobriety test—say "rubber buggy bumper" ten times fast—and his ability to do it convinces them that he must be drunk. The centerpiece of the film is an extended "nobody's piloting the motorcycle" stolen from the superior Buster Keaton film Sherlock Jr.. The comparison may not be fair (Keaton being one of the undeniable slapstick geniuses), but it's impossible to avoid judging this film against its predecessor and finding it lacking in style, timing, and outrageousness. Keaton's routine was marked by constant and seemingly real near-disaster, but Clyde's is shot mostly against a rear-projection screen, and without any whiff of danger, it just doesn't work.

A Zeppo in the Valley of Death

I would like to draw your attention to the helicopter ride that transports Arnold Schwarzenegger's crack team of hardened soldiers to the depths of the jungle, shortly after the beginning of John McTiernan's archetypal 1980s action film, Predator. Its prime reason for existing is to introduce us to each character's identifying traits. It is the most efficient scene of its kind in any action movie I've seen. In action movies, most characters don't get developed, because there's not enough time. They usually get one trait—the tall guy, the guy with the glasses, the black guy, etc. If a character is lucky, he or she might get more than one trait—the tall guy with glasses, the black guy who tells jokes, etc. On that helicopter ride, we get to know these soldiers. There's Hawkins, played by the action-movie writer Shane Black, who wears geeky glasses, tells bad jokes, and has lightning-fast reflexes. There's Billy (Sonny Landham), who is a laconic Native American who doesn't get the jokes. There's Mac (Bill Duke), a black man who shaves constantly and is incredibly, almost scarily, intense. Blain (Jesse Ventura) is an arrogant loudmouth who chews tobacco and wears one of those Australian Outback hats. Dillon (Carl Weathers), the newcomer to the group, is eager to fit in, clumsy in his attempts, and disliked by everyone. After this three-minute scene, we know everything we need to know about all of the characters, in addition to learning a little more about Dutch (Schwarzenegger). Other action-movie screenwriters should look to it for guidance. It should be taught in seminars.

But then there's Poncho, played by Richard Chaves. What's he doing in that helicopter? At 5'10", he is three inches shorter than the next tallest commando. He doesn't have hypertrophied biceps or a 30-inch neck. He doesn't wear an extravagant hat or huge glasses. He doesn't dry-shave with a disposable razor, tell lame jokes, or chew tobacco. He doesn't carry a battery-powered machine cannon or a foot-long machete. Compared to the virtual superheroes surrounding him, he's pretty ordinary, almost a nobody. But he's not a nobody—he's us.

In literature, an audience surrogate is someone who essentially stands in for the reader, asking questions or making observations that prompt exposition or explanation. It's often a tool of mystery writers and comic-book writers (Jimmy Olson in Superman is a good example). The audience surrogate is an average person caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Chaves's Poncho is one of the most craftily written audience surrogates in film. He's not just our window into the film's mysteries; he's the the guinea pig, the canary in the coalmine, the workhorse, the prompter of catch-phrases, and, significantly, the last commando aside from Arnold to die and the first to be listed in the end credits. Poncho, he of the terminal ordinariness, is one of the most important characters in the film, and the filmmakers knew it.

Much of the rest of Poncho's dialogue is traditional audience surrogate questions and statements, some of which frankly states the obvious, as if he's speaking for us. When the team starts finding skinned human bodies, he asks incredulously, "The guerrillas skinned them?" And later, "Why did they skin them?" Why, indeed? Hmm. Maybe it's not guerrillas. After Bill Duke kills a wild boar, thinking it's the creature stalking them, Poncho points out, "You killed a pig." When the Predator manages to sneak in through a series of tripwires and steal a dead commando's body, Poncho observes, "It came in through the tripwires." But sometimes his observations clear up potential audience questions: we're wondering why they don't just have the chopper fly to where they are, and he immediately says "Shitload of good a chopper's gonna do us in here anyhow," referring to the thick jungle they're fighting through. Finally, he's the most human in his reactions, giving us someone to identify with. He reacts to the skinned bodies with "Holy mother of God"; when Arnold asks him if he's found a missing character, he groans "I can't tell," referring to the pile of intestines he's been asked to identify.

But let's not forget one of his dialogue's most important functions: because this is a 1980s action film, someone needs to facilitate the one-liners, and that duty falls to Pancho. Were it not for his "You're bleeding," Jesse Ventura would have no reason to utter the film's best one-liner, "I ain't got time to bleed." He's also willing to sacrifice grammar to help his comrades-in-arms. In an exchange with Sonny Landham, after learning that the taciturn Indian is scared, he has an awkward line: "You ain't afraid of no man." The reason for the phrasing becomes apparent when Landham replies, "There's something out there, and it ain't no man."

Because we're discovering the alien creature's mysteries at the same rate as the characters, it's no coincidence that our stand-in is usually the one sent out to figure out what's going on. He climbs the tree to inspect the downed helicopter. He leads the soldiers out of the rebel camp. He's the first to walk into the valley of death. He discovers Hawkins's body. He's sent out after the huge firefight to discover that they didn't hit anything. He believes their attractive rebel captive when she talks about the jungle coming alive; he's the only one who can speak Spanish enough to communicate with her (at least until she reveals that she can speak English). His role as trailblazer is crucial: because the film is so careful about what it reveals and when, we're often kept in the dark. When the script requires us to learn something, it's usually Poncho who does the learning for us.

It's not surprising that he tends to disappear during the big firefights: we came to watch bigger-than-life, musclebound superbeings doing their thing, and we don't want to watch some guy who looks like our mailman. It's also no mistake that he's the last commando to die: he's our witness to everything that happens in the film, and he holds on until there's nothing new for us to learn and the film passes out of the realm of ordinary people like us and into Schwarzenegger vs. space alien territory. The facts that he's nearly killed by wandering into one of his own booby traps and then becomes a burden to Schwarzenegger until he's rather ignominiously offed by the space monster just adds to the connection: if I were in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, I'd probably wander into a booby trap too.

In the single best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "The Zeppo," Buffy's audience surrogate, Xander Harris, saves the world without any of his more talented friends noticing. The reference is to the fourth Marx brother—the straight man, the normal guy who doesn't get any routines of his own. The Zeppo here, Richard Chaves's Poncho, is essential to Predator's success, but nobody notices him—including me, until I rewatched the film for this essay. He stands out by resolutely not standing out; he's central to the film by being peripheral to the superhero goings-on.

Announcing the William Wyler Blogathon

When I think of William Wyler, I think of the Oscars. The Best Years of Our Lives. Ben-Hur. Dodsworth. Mrs. Miniver. The Heiress. Jezebel. Thirteen of the 36 narrative films he directed after graduating from two-reel Westerns were nominated for Best Picture; Wyler himself received twelve Best Director nominations and won three awards. Actors and actresses in Wyler films had a better-than-average shot at a nomination: thirty-six of them received nominations, and fourteen won.

But in the William Wyler Blogathon, which is happening here over the weekend of September 21-23, you don't have to think of the Oscars. You can think of anything you want, as long as it has something to do with Mr. Wyler or his films. You don't even have to like him to participate.

Be creative: he directed 38 films between 1928 and 1970, from romantic comedies (Roman Holiday) to Westerns (The Westerner) to documentaries (Thunderbolt) to historical epics (Ben-Hur) to social problem films (Dead End) to musicals (Funny Girl) to thrillers (The Desperate Hours) to costume dramas (The Heiress) to cop films (Detective Story), most of which are available on DVD or videocassette, so there's plenty of room for everyone (i.e., we don't all have to write on Dodsworth, even though we might want to) (I'm not writing on Dodsworth).

Let me know if you'll be joining in the festivities. I'll send around a gentle reminder closer to the blessed weekend. Then, during the weekend of September 21-23, put up your post and email me a link. If you want to help spread the word, feel free to use any of the graphics below.

49 Films the AFI Forgot

The American Film Institute continues its "100 Years, 10,000 Lists" listmaking mania by updating its Top 100 American (And A Few British) Films Of All Time. The blogosphere has been abuzz with smart rejoinders and alternate lists, so I figured I'd jump on that train and come up with my own list of films omitted from both their top 100 list and their 400-film ballot—but in prose form! (I'm putting the film titles in bold italics to aid in skimming.) The AFI list is pretty "safe," and most of these are "safe" too—nothing too terribly challenging—but they're films that deserve the kind of recognition that the AFI films get.

The AFI generally stiffed the silents, but unfortunately they've included many of the ones I've seen, so I'm as bad as they are in this case. Let me throw in The Unknown (1927), the last of the great silents, so I can feel a little bit superior about the silent era before moving on to films I know more about.

For the pre-Code era, my favorite period in film history, you have to start with Rouben Mamoulian's dynamic, roving camera in Applause (1929), which proved that the talkies didn't have to be clunky (although it took a while for the lesson to catch on). Ernst Lubitsch's elegant and hilarious Trouble in Paradise (1932) was arguably his career high point, although he crops up again on my list. Josef von Sternberg's best film, the decadent Shanghai Express (1932), would make a great double-feature with Frank Capra's gorgeous and heartbreaking The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933); miles away from Capracorn, he almost out-Sternbergs von Sternberg. The manly art of killing is the subject of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), as well as the almost completely unknown film The Eagle and the Hawk (1933), which starred Fredric March as another guy who loses his marbles over killing (in a less other-oriented way than Leslie Banks does in the previous film). And a year before Hays and company drove a stake through the heart of one of the most dynamic half-decades in film history, Busby Berkeley's unheralded (by the AFI, at least) Footlight Parade (1933) (yeah, I know he didn't direct it, but it's his film anyway) was the best of his magic 1933 trifecta (the others being Dames and 42nd Street).

But the 1930s kept chugging along, despite the Code. There was the inspired baroque lunacy of Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which exceeded its predecessor in every way, as well as two of Charles Laughton's best performances in Les Miserables (1935) and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). The AFI probably didn't include Dorothy Arzner's masterpiece of double meaning, Craig's Wife (1936), because it's so hard to see anywhere (and because she's a woman), but what's the excuse for leaving off Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the film Leo McCarey called the best of his career (he's wrong, but not by much)? Oh, right: it's hard to see anywhere, a problem the AFI is doing little to remedy.

Raoul Walsh's best film, The Strawberry Blonde (1941), is missing, likely because it's not "representative" of his work. But the lunatic exchanges between Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in The Talk of the Town (1942) are certainly representative of their work, as representative as the sublime Heaven Can Wait (1943) is of Lubitsch's work. (I like The Shop Around the Corner, but not enough to complain that it was left off the ballot—I'll leave that to other bloggers.) It's a crime that Cat People was left off the final 100, but the bigger crime is that Val Lewton's masterpiece, The Seventh Victim (1943), didn't even make the ballot.

Noir and boxing are two staples of the 1940s that the AFI really missed the boat on. In the black trunks, we have the brilliant Scarlet Street (1945), the hyper-gritty Detour (1945), and one of the best screen adaptations of all time in The Killers (1946); in the equally dark trunks, we have a masterpiece of the soon-to-be-blacklisted in Body and Soul (1947), along with a film that serves as a bridge between the two worlds, the noir boxing dirge The Set-Up (1949).

Don't get me wrong: Rebel Without a Cause is a great film, but it's not the beginning and end of Nicholas Ray. He also coaxed out Humphrey Bogart's best performance in In a Lonely Place (1950) and queered the western in Johnny Guitar (1954). But the biggest omission in the AFI ballot and final list is Samuel Fuller. What they're telling us is that Samuel Fuller did not make any of the top 400 American films of all time. Not The Steel Helmet (1951), not Park Row (1952), and not Pickup on South Street (1953), just to name a few. Good job, AFI.

Nobody's heard of Phil Karlson, and nobody's heard of his best films, the prescient newspaper satire-noir Scandal Sheet (1952) or the downright terrifying The Phenix City Story (1955). Nobody's heard of Richard Fleischer's taut thriller The Narrow Margin (1952), which could teach Hitchcock a thing or two about filming on trains. One might think that part of the AFI's mission is to remedy these slights, but then one might be wrong.

How could they forget the best live-action cartoon ever made, Frank Tashlin's delirious The Girl Can't Help It (1955); the best Southern Gothic cannibalism psychoanalysis melodrama, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) (Monty got a raw deal); the best film about a hitman who just might be dead already, John Boorman's frenetic Point Blank (1967); the best film shot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969); and the best young-lovers-on-a-tear film, Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973)?

Let's not forget that they got the wrong Star Wars movie; The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is the highlight of the series. Speaking of sci-fi (look at that smooth segue), they missed John Carpenter's superior The Thing (1982).

Woody Allen seldom balanced humor and pathos as well as he did in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), a balancing act that plays out in radically different ways in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything (1989) and Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger (1990). (Ok, fine. Sometimes I'm really stretching to connect films.) Two sometimes-phenomenal writer-directors with unmistakeable styles were left off the lists, so I'll insert David Mamet's House of Games (1987) and John Sayles's Lone Star (1996). The AFI generally stiffed African Americans and women, so no wonder Kasi Lemmons's miraculous debut Eve's Bayou (1997) wasn't there—she has two strikes against her. And where are the Coen brothers? Lots of people complained loudly when Fargo got dropped off the top 100 list, but it isn't even their best film. That would be either Blood Simple (1984), The Big Lebowski (1998), or O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).

Finally, I can't think of anything to connect Paul Thomas Anderson's operatic Magnolia (1999), Cameron Crowe's masterpiece Almost Famous (2000), and Terry Zwigoff's quirky Ghost World (2001), except that in each film people start spontaneously singing. Except in Ghost World.

OK folks, what am I missing? What brilliant films did I join the AFI in snubbing?

1978 Supporting Actress Smackdown

I'm taking part in StinkyLulu's Supporting Actress Smackdown for the first time! StinkyLulu, Canadian Ken, Tim at Mainly Movies, RBurton of Adam Waldowski Doesn't Watch Non-Oscar Nominees (I feel ya), and yours truly discuss the merits and demerits of the five actresses nominated that year.

The highlight is Maureen Stapleton's nearly-film-saving turn in Woody Allen's dour, oppressive Interiors. Allen's first drama is full of self-obsessed, damaged upper-class white people who talk like they're giving a lecture—you know, like a Woody Allen film, only without any humor, which makes most of the film completely unbearable. But then Stapleton charges into the film—practically yelling "Opa!" and actually smashing crockery as she barrels through the beige decor—and makes the last third positively good when she's onscreen and bearable when her technicolor shadow is hanging over the other scenes. It would be easy to view her role as a classist "lower class woman who's simple but full of life," but Stapleton takes the conceit and runs with it, cramming in little hints of humanity and ambivalence. She's never better than in her final scene, standing on the beach while one important character drowns and another nearly does. What's she thinking in those two closeups? There's so much going on in her face, in her almost panting mouth movements and the stricken look in her eyes, that I watched the scene three times straight without really fully processing it. It's one of the best supporting actress performances I've ever seen.

With Maggie Smith, who's almost as great in Neil Simon's miscue California Suite, and Meryl Streep, who's good but overly mannered in The Deer Hunter (three nominees with the initials MS—whoa), it's a fascinating year for the category, even considering the out-of-her-depth Penelope Milford in the otherwise outstanding Coming Home and the positively bad Dyan Cannon in Heaven Can Wait. Head on over to Stinkylulu's to check out what the rest of the Smackdowners thought.

And Also Starring Errol Flynn: The Action Movies of Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland was born in 1916 in Tokyo, Japan. She started acting in eighth-grade school plays, moved on to a part in Max Reinhardt's stage version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and made her film debut in 1935. (I'm condensing a little.) Also in 1935, she was cast (over Jean Muir and Bette Davis) in the swashbuckling adventure film Captain Blood. Her costar was a virtual unknown from Australia who was being sold as an Irishman: Errol Flynn. Flynn got the part because Robert Donat, Ronald Colman, Leslie Howard, Clark Gable, Brian Aherne, and Ian Hunter were unavailable. Over the next six years, the pair would costar in eight films together; two of those (Four's a Crowd and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) weren't action movies. This essay discusses the six that were. It was intended as an entry in Nathaniel's Action Heroine Blog-a-Thon, but my blog was still broken on that happy day, and then I got overwhelmed with work.

CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935)

She's the neice of the evil governor of Jamaica; he's a pacifist doctor convicted of treason and sent to Jamaica as a slave. He ends up a pirate, and she ends up one of his captives. We first meet her when she buys Flynn at auction and seems genuinely shocked that he's not grateful; her benificence turns into good-natured spite as she taunts him by continually coming to his rescue. They have some nice sparring scenes, her snappishness, as usual, coming across as more genuine than his. She can't sell the bashfulness that's supposed to overcome her when he's blunt about his feelings for her, but there's a hint of the complexity of her earlier scenes when she gives him a near-predatory, lips-parted glance after slapping him for being so forward.

I like her quite a bit in the early scenes, but by the time the pirate action gets going, she's devolved into a rather typical "the girl" performance, shackled in part by some awful lines that nobody could manage with dignity—"go back to your ladies of Tortuga who are thrilled by your bold, lawless ways!"—but also giving in to the temptation to both overact a little more than is necessary, and at times to grow curiously inert. It doesn't help that she's saddled with increasingly stupefying costumes, a horrific laugh-giggle, and even an ugly little dog to emphasize her girlishness, to which she contributes with ample eyelash fluttering and that hands-clasped-to-bosom thing.

There is an interesting scene at the end when she spoofs the typical hand-wringing overacting one expects from "the girl" in an adventure film, but I'm not sure what to make of it. It's quite funny, but she is, after all, spoofing her own performance up to that point. Does she realize it? I think so, or at least I'm going to assume she does, because in the denouement she's already doing a comic escalation of the hand-wringing when she thinks her uncle is going to hang Blood, not knowing that Blood is the new governor. The final scene just takes it the next step into outright comic hysterics. De Havilland has a flair for comedy (despite what Charles Higham thinks), and she clearly relishes getting to overact in that final scene.

Behind the scenes: Charles Higham, in Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Haviland and Joan Fontaine (New York: Coward-McCann, 1984, p. 52) tells us that de Havilland fell hopelessly in love with her handsome scumbag of a costar; he reciprocated by cheating on his wife, Lili Damita, with every other female on the set except Olivia. Flynn's legendary drinking sometimes disrupted the shooting schedule, as did de Havilland's unconscionable decision to choose her own costumes, both of which resulted in sternly-worded missives from Hal Wallis.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (1936)

She's the daughter of a military man; he's a dashing soldier in the doomed brigade made famous by Tennyson's poetic celebration of bad military decisions. This features what seems like de Havilland's lowest screen time-to-film length ratio; she's barely in it, and although she's involved in a central love triangle (the other person is Patric Knowles as Flynn's brother), she seems absent from much of the film. She does get one action-type scene: During a harrowing massacre, she struggles against an enemy soldier who's attempting to do her harm. Flynn saves her, and she repays him by patching the bullet wound in his shoulder and, later, dumping him for his little brother.

She doesn't give a very good performance. There’s far too much head-waggling and breathiness for emphasis; at times, she sounds like Bette Davis trying to sound coy, which is a scary thing to hear coming out of de Havilland. Throughout, her voice sounds pinched and overly theatrical, as if she’s trying, and failing, to make a bigger screen impression to compensate for her smaller part. She wrings her hands through the dramatic scenes, that cute little pained, worried look permanently etched on her face—early in her career, that was her best look, and she knew it. It doesn’t help that director Michael Curtiz, who didn’t like her, favors Flynn in all of their two-shots: he’s in the middle of the frame, and she’s pushed off to the side.

Behind the scenes: Flynn embarked on a campaign of tasteless practical jokes to annoy Olivia, including putting a giant rubber snake in her panties (this fits with his own autobiography, in which he relishes his descriptions of the practical jokes he played on his costars). Director Michael Curtiz had obscenity-laced screaming matches with Flynn throughout the shoot, which was miserable for Olivia anyway because she had to ride 80 miles a day to a sweltering desert location.

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938)

She's Maid Marian; he's Robin Hood. De Havilland is busy in this 1938 teamup with Flynn. She changes her allegiance from Norman to Saxon, falls for an outlaw, hatches a brilliant escape plan, turns into a spy, and gets locked in the dungeon. And this is the first time I noticed the little dimple in her chin when she's doing her patented excited/afraid face. One of the best things about watching her closely is seeing how she manages to add little flourishes to sometimes thinly-written parts, often with wordless gestures that add another dimension to a scene. Just after Flynn's dished the dirt on nasty Prince John, he kisses her hand and then they turn to go. We cut to a long shot of them walking, hand in hand, and for a split second she hesitates, raising her head a bit and taking a breath, as if she's still conflicted about the decision to go along with him, before she trots to catch up to him.

The script sort of jerks her around: sometimes she's the smartest person in the room, and sometimes she's pretty stupid. After her world-shifting walk in the woods with Robin, you'd think that her opinion of Prince John would fall a little, but in the next scene (the famous archery contest) she's sitting happily by his side, incredulous that anything fishy could be going on. When Robin is captured, she's the one who hatches the escape plot, which is one of the most active things that she gets to do in any of the films with Flynn, but her spying career is dreadful: she thinks merely hunching over in plain sight is enough to keep her hidden, and when she's interrupted in writing a letter to warn Robin, she hides it in the only receptacle in the room and then glances at it repeatedly, her cute little brow crinkled up in her "concerned" face, until Rathbone figures out what's going on. No surprise she ends up in chokey. She overdoes it once in a while, relying too much on the emphatic head shake to make her points. Still, it's one of her best roles in the Flynn films.

Behind the scenes: Olivia had to memorize her part while shooting another film, Gold Is Where You Find It. Flynn's drinking grew worse, turning him into "a monster who allegedly would make love to any living thing" (Higham's words, p. 68), and one night he attempted to break down Olivia's door and rape her. He was finally dissuaded by his stunt double. Keep in mind that Higham's hatred and character assassination of Flynn are legendary, and it's perfectly likely that he made this incident up or inflated a drunken attempt at seduction.

DODGE CITY (1939)

She's the niece of a doctor; he's a hard-riding cowboy who gets made sheriff of Dodge City. She has to spend half the film hating him, then of course they fall in love. She's pretty active in this one, by turns a Sunday-school teacher, a society columnist, and an investigative journalist; she uncovers the bad guys' dastardly train-robbery plans; she's taken hostage and then involved in a gunfight (sadly, she doesn't do any shooting), at the end of which she's potentially in the path of bullets (peeking under Flynn's elbow). Pretty hairy stuff for a de Havilland character.

However, she doesn't seem very interested. She's really muted and seems uncommitted. We can see that she's feeling or thinking something, but her body language doesn't sell it. Her line readings are off; it often sounds like she's just reading out loud. There's one particularly bad scene where she's involved in a conversation with Flynn and two others, and you can tell who's going to speak next by watching where she's looking. It's probably her worst performance in any of these films.

Behind the scenes: De Havilland was very upset at getting saddled (heh, it's a Western) with another Flynn film. She was "testy, irritable, even filled with fury during the entire shooting" (Higham, p. 77). She met and started dating Howard Hughes during the shooting, but not before Louella Parsons proclaimed that she was already married to the reclusive millionaire.

SANTA FE TRAIL (1940)

She's Kit Carson Holliday, daughter of a railroad baron; he's J.E.B. Stuart, fresh out of West Point. If she looked bored and lost in 1939's Dodge City, she makes up for it here as a fiery dark-haired beauty with an unlikely moniker that had me excited that she'd get to do some a-gunnin' and a-fightin', until I remembered that Kit Carson was a man. Still, she's a peach. The first word out of her mouth is a Texas-sized whoop at the West Point graduation ceremony when her brother Bob gets his handshake from Commandant Robert E. Lee. Bob's fellow graduates J.E.B. Stuart (Flynn) and George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan) (yes, Ronald Reagan plays the Son of the Morning Star, a role Flynn would take on the next year) decide she's the one for them, and she has a great time humoring both men. Although she's credited second, she has very little screen time; while the men are off being manly and shooting at one another, she's waiting in the wings to steal her five or six scenes.

I’ve mentioned that she excelled at comedy, and she gets a few scenes to show off here. The wooing scenes, which usually featured a confident Flynn and a cocky Reagan, are played for laughs, as she goodnaturedly leads Reagan on and halfheartedly staves off Flynn's advances. She makes great use of her eyebrows; she has a way of raising them just a hair—a combination of mocking and challenging—that makes me melt every time (she used this to great effect the following year in The Strawberry Blonde). She obviously relishes getting a break from all the lacey frippery she usually has to wear; in an early scene she's covered in dirt, wearing a torn skirt and calling people "ornery cusses," something that her many drawing-room dramas didn't allow.

However, her role is mostly dramatic, and her performance is richer and more emotionally resonant than in the previous film. She's one of the only characters who can see both sides of the slavery debate as well as what the future holds. She's the only major character who is allowed to acknowledge that John Brown's cause is just, even if his actions are immoral; poor Ronald Reagan attempts to speak up in favor of abolitionists, only to cave in immediately when Flynn lectures him, but de Havilland won't back down. There's a silly scene where several officers consult a Native American fortune teller and learn that soon they'll be bitter enemies, but we can see in de Havilland's unsurprised anguish that none of this is news to her. The real surprise—well, it's not a surprise, since the formula requires them to get married—is that she marries Flynn in the end, since she already knows where his passionate committment to the South will lead them. (No pics for this—I moved, and I can't find the DVD!)

Behind the scenes: De Havilland's reward for her triumph in Gone with the Wind was yet another Flynn vehicle, and she wasn't pleased. She was seeing James Stewart and fending off Van Heflin's advances; Flynn was (according to Higham's unsubstantiated claims, p. 116, which have been disproved elsewhere) busy helping Nazis enter the United States, and flubbing his lines a lot.

THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON (1941)

She's the daughter of a wealthy businessman; he's George Armstrong Custer. She was heartily sick of appearing in these films, but her growth as an actress—maybe just her increasing ability to keep her feelings about the quality of the film from appearing in her performance—is apparent, as she gives her best performance in a film costarring Errol Flynn. Her introduction to the film is one of the comic highlights of the series: he's on guard duty and can't talk, and she prattles on at him, increasingly agitated that he won't pay any attention to her. Of course they fall in love. The generally chaste, adolescent love of the previous films, however, is replaced with something that implies the actual physical aspects of romance: there's a kissing scene where she's nearly horizontal, a far cry from the brief embraces of the other films, and she makes a couple of cracks (delivered with fetching raised eyebrows) that border on the raunchy (well, as close to raunch as you could get in 1941).

The last scene they shot together was her best: Custer's about to ride off into what he knows will be a massacre, and she knows he's not coming back, but the code of the stiff upper lip won't allow either to admit it. She pretends that she always writes in her diary about "premonitions of disaster," and he pretends to believe her. They both pretend to be flippant; at one point she asks, "Don't I look happy?" Of course she doesn't. She overdoes the twitchy-lip thing toward the end, but for the most part it's a flawless scene, and even Flynn rises to the occasion. And then she was done with him. Her last scene in the film (it was shot out of order) is a bit of a letdown—she's too fidgety and distracted in a scene that doesn't call for distraction—but it doesn't damage her overall performance. She seems to be doing an unnecessary accent that comes and goes, but it's a minor problem as well.

Behind the scenes: Even another Oscar nomination (this one for Hold Back the Dawn) wasn't enough to save her from her final Flynn feature, which Higham claims she had to do because her sister Joan Fontaine refused the part, "thus compelling Olivia to accept it" (how would that work? they were under contract to different studios. anyway). This role forced her to turn down a Leo McCarey comedy, the Bette Davis role in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and the female lead in Kings Row, any of which she would have preferred. The studio was angry at her for various things (like wanting to be treated like a human being), so they forced her to star in The Male Animal at the same time, and she became sick and depressed. At the end of the year, she learned that Jack Warner had decided to cast her sister Joan in The Constant Nymph instead of Olivia.

CONCLUSION

I kept hoping that she'd get a chance to stab someone with a sword, even if the sword belonged to someone else, or shoot a desperado, even if she had to swoon into Flynn's arms immediately after. However, I'm not surprised that she never did: de Havilland was being groomed as a Serious Actress, and besides, what women of the 1930s and 1940s got to kick ass (outside of the comedies, that is)? When you think about what little help she got from Flynn, it's amazing how good she tended to be in these films (with a couple of exceptions). Acting opposite an overgrown wooden boy whose only expressions were cynical, happy, and angry must have been difficult, forcing her to carry scene after scene. (I'm not disparaging Flynn too much: he was certainly a handsome, dashing leading man who could pull off action scenes with aplomb, and he knew how to use his commanding voice and undeniable "presence" to his advantage. He just wasn't capable of any subtlety.) De Havilland went on to four Oscar nominations and two wins; Flynn went on to three statutory rape trials. Charles Higham (p. 53) tells us that in one of their first serious conversations together, she asked Flynn what he wanted from life, to which he replied, "success," which she took to mean fame and money. When he asked her what she wanted, she said "respect," which she certainly deserved and received. Just not always from Warner Brothers.

Rocks That Movie

I can't believe I've failed to link to this already, but my good friend Shane at Rocks That Move has been blogging his 50 favorite films. He and I sort of discovered good film together, renting everything that looked worth watching (and a bunch that didn't) from every video store within driving distance of Manistee, Michigan. In a way, he was my gateway drug: he insisted that I watch this great film called Howards End, and I never looked back. Together, we started the quest to watch every film ever nominated for Best Picture, but Shane realized that there are more important things in life (I'm still not convinced!). Anyway, here's his list: Introduction, 46-50, 41-45, 36-40, 31-35, 26-30, 21-25, 16-20, 11-15, 6-10. Now he's counting down his top five individually: 5, 4, 3, 2 (new!), and now his #1 movie is up.

Along the way he posted a highly amusing alternate list for 21-25, reacting to grumblings in the comments that he hadn't included any crappy movies yet. He's still got two slots to fill, so it's not too late.

Making the Grade: Gimme an F

This is my contribution to the White Elephant Blog-a-Thon hosted by Lucid Screening. Each participant sent in the title of a particularly bad movie (or so I thought, although other participants are reviewing Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Purple Rain, and Forbidden Games), and in return receives a random title. I suggested William Holden and his bare-chested antics in Picnic, which Hedwig reviews over at As Cool as a Fruitstand.

I was nine years old in 1984, when Making the Grade was released. In schoolyard conversations, my friends and I sometimes discussed the social divisions in "big kids" and "grownups." We were reasonably certain that they were divided into "preppies" and "burnouts"; some kids with older siblings could report, with that nine-year-old solemnity brought on by superior wisdom, on the brands of clothing that signified true preppiehood. So I was struck with a peculiar kind of nostalgia during a scene in Making the Grade when one character gives another a lesson in how to dress preppy: peculiar because I was too young to experience the preppy years firsthand, so the nostalgia was for a time when such things as alligators on polo shirts and rolled-up pantlegs were the mysteries of distant adulthood.

Of course, the mystery is still there, but in a different form: why on earth did anyone ever think that layering pink and green polo shirts was a good idea?

But on to the movie. Slovenly rich boy Palmer Woodrow (Dana Olsen), desperate to figure out how to avoid having to go to prep school (he's apparently a seventh-year senior, although he looks more like a fifteenth-year senior, what with his big head emphasized by his receding hairline), stumbles upon the brilliant idea of hiring a poor person to impersonate him at school. But where could he find a poor person in his world of luxury cars and private country clubs? Enter Eddie Keaton (Judd Nelson in his film debut), a street kid from Jersey who's on the run from his faux-eloquent bookie Dice Man (Andrew Clay). The two strike a deal, and it's off to posh Hanover Academy for Eddie's fish-out-of-water story.

At the prep school are bullies named Biff (Scott McGinnis) and Skip (John Dye), mysterious sports like field hockey, and, most importantly, preppy clothes. The film's best scene is when the real Palmer's friend Rand (Carey Scott) takes Eddie clothes shopping and explains to him the code of the preppy, which is likely lifted verbatim from Lisa Birnbach's Official Preppy Handbook, which had been published as a satire but quickly became a bible. "A tie's knot should never be bigger than your head," Rand explains to a mystified Eddie. "Socks: wear them only to weddings, and then only if it's your own." Eddie falls for Tracy (Jonna Lee), the beautiful granddaughter of the school's founder, who loves him because he's different. However, prepdom insinuates itself into Eddie's personality, turning him into more of a Palmer Woodrow than the real Palmer was. Will there be a big speech where he learns his lesson and explains it to an unlikely audience? I wouldn't dream of telling you.

There's another kind of nostalgia here: for that particular brand of early- to mid-eighties filmmaking. I loved the aforementioned shopping scene, which is in a long line of "training" sequences, such as the scenes in Footloose when Kevin Bacon teaches Chris Penn to dance. There's a scene in which Eddie shows off his breakdancing skills, although the person dancing is clearly not Judd Nelson, who gets intermittent closeups striking poses and doing an awkward Robot. There's a song score of particularly bad synth-pop, a sort of sub-Giorgio Moroder collection of songs that sound like rejects from Scarface and Flashdance (indeed, one of the performers, Shandi, wrote and performed "He's a Dream" from the latter film). And there's not one, but two spontaneous dance numbers: I'm cheating a little here, because the first one, during the opening credits, has Eddie semi-dancing to the film's theme song, "Living on the Edge," which he's playing on his large silver boombox; and the second one does take place at a school dance, albeit the kind of dance that has never seen breakdancing before. Walter Olkewicz appears as Coach Wordman, a third-rate approximation of John Belushi; and an uncredited Dan Schneider appears as "Blimp," the obligatory picked-on fat kid (you might remember him from a string of 1980s films and TV shows, such as "Head of the Class").

And, of course, there's Andrew Clay, a standup comedian approached by the producers in the parking lot of a Los Angeles comedy club. He apparently loved his John Travolta-meets-Mean Streets character Dice Man so much that he started calling himself Andrew Dice Clay. In that same parking lot, the producers approached another comedian about starring in this film, but Jim Carrey turn them down, giving Judd Nelson his first starring role. A similar "what might have been" involves the soundtrack: the film had little money to spend on the composer, and they gave it all to a relative newcomer named Danny Elfman. However, the producers then rejected him, which might have had something to do with the rather confused state of the music rights (see the film's trivia page at IMDB).

The film is not, by any measure, any good. There are a few laughs, and the first kiss between Eddie and Tracy was unexpectedly sweet and poignant, but that was one of the few times when the film gave the impression of really knowing anything at all about high-school kids. The filmmakers had studied other teen comedies, but not closely enough to pick up any real feeling for their subjects. Making the Grade was released the same month as Sixteen Candles, and whatever you think about John Hughes, his films showed that he had an ear for how teenagers express themselves. Here, screenwriters Gene Quintano (Police Academy 3, Operation Dumbo Drop) and Charles Gale (Ernest Scared Stupid)... well, there's nothing more to say after typing Ernest Scared Stupid. Making the Grade has to go to summer school. (In fact, a return trip was planned: the closing credits promise a sequel, Tourista, which never materialized. Ah, the 1980s.)

Top 10 of 2006: #4-#3

4. Drawing Restraint 9. A European couple (director Matthew Barney and his wife Björk) hitch a ride on a Japanese whaling ship. They're served tea in an elaborate ceremony. On deck, the crew builds an enormous whale-shaped sculpture out of petroleum jelly, into which they insert a large piece of ambergis, which becomes the focus of a ceremony. Belowdecks, post-ceremony, the European couple disembowel each other and turn into whales. I was seldom absolutely sure what any of this meant—it seems I'm reduced to plot synopsis—but I was never less than entranced: sculptor-filmmaker Matthew Barney achived something resembling a Lynchian nirvana, where not a lot makes sense but it doesn't matter because the enigmatic visuals are so welcoming yet opaque, and because the actors seem so willing to go along with Barney, no matter what he asks them to do. Throw in the first music by Björk that I really liked, and you have the makings of a unique cinematic experience that I really, really need to see again.

3. Dave Chapelle's Block Party. Carried along by Michel Gondry's direction, Ellen Kuras's instinctive camera work, and the crackerjack editing, Dave Chappelle's Block Party flits about in time, following the planning and execution of a New York block party hosted by Dave Chappelle. Several of the segues between rehearsals and live performances gave me pleasant shivers, while the film's forays into Chappelle's home turf in Ohio and its exploration of the very different Bed-Stuy setting for the concert are sometimes giddy, sometimes surprisingly introspective. A friend said it felt like Dave Chappelle was running for office, and I suppose that's correct, but that office is "nice and approachable guy who hasn't been changed by his huge $50 million contract," a motivation for the block party that the film digs into without calling undue attention to it. And then there's the music. I've already discussed Kanye West's fabulous entry and the magnificent rush of the reunited Fugees, but everybody, from Mos Def and Talib Kweli (not sure if they were performing as Black Star or not, but they were on fire) to Erykah Badu, gave inspired performances. (Previously: Best Documentary, Best Musical Moment.)

Back at the Ranch

Now that the blog-a-thon is done, I've returned to writing reviews. I really need to go see a new film, though; it's been too long.

Michael Curtiz's Mandalay has one of the best coded shots in film history (by coded, I mean that it was designed to reveal something about a character without coming right out and saying it), in addition to a likeable performance from the odd-looking Kay Francis.

Busby Berkeley's They Made Me a Criminal wastes a lot of talent, from director Berkeley to John Garfield to Claude Rains, in what could have been a good film about a boxer framed for murder.

Top 10 of 2006: #6-#5

6. Crank. One of the most unjustly ignored films of the year, Crank is a joyful, witty celebration of excess from former commercial directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. It's an R-rated Looney Tunes cartoon, starring a hilariously deadpan Jason Statham and featuring the best female performance of the year from Amy Smart, whose skewering of the "dumb blonde" role I've already praised. It functions as an over-the-top action movie while simultaneously taking the genre down: Statham apparently destroys half of Los Angeles in his quest to get even, a cranked-up-to-eleven commentary on the sociopathic mayhem endorsed by most action films. Neveldine and Taylor's scenario gives them a reason to throw in every visual and audio trick they've learned; unlike films of the Tony Scott School, where it's all a masquerade for a bankruptcy of ideas, here all the slice-and-dice editing, spaced-out color palettes, and soundtrack jiggering flow from the story.

5. The Departed. Martin Scorsese's remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs is a free-wheeling, happily profane examination of honor and loyalty. The centerpiece is the giddily edited (thanks again to Thelma Schoonmaker and the sound design team) extended sequence detailing the rise of both the real cop/fake gangster (Leonardo DiCaprio, giving the best performance of his career) and the real gangster/fake cop (Matt Damon, remind us exactly how good he is). There's a plethora of great supporting turns, especially Mark Wahlberg's Mametian (near Shakespearean) cursing and Alec Baldwin's running stand-up routine. It's too bad the film is marred by yet another sloppy "crazy Jack" performance by Jack Nicholson and the script's inability to make Vera Farmiga's character seem like a person (although Farmiga does wonders with it).

The 1927 Blog-a-Thon

Thanks to everyone for helping bring this off—it turned out even better than I had hoped! There's one post still to come, so if you have anything you wanted to include but didn't get done in time, feel free to send me your last-minute links.

My own contributions are Now Showing in Chicago, detailing all 56 films playing at all 102 theaters in Chicago this weekend in 1927, and an article on Clara Bow and It.

The Entries (in order of appearance):

• Squish on the high price of transition to the talkies (and other goodies)
• Edward Copeland on Buster Keaton's The General
• My favorite art historian on Josephine Baker in Siren of the Tropics
• Operator_99, on a series of German Metropolis postcards
• Damian on 1927 as presented in Singin' in the Rain
• Pinky gives us an MP3 of "The Varsity Drag" (and promises more later this weekend)
• Film of the Year on the Technicolor short film The Flag
• Rocks That Move on film people conceived in 1927
• Nick on Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness
• Movie Time Capsule on films set in 1927
• Pinky's back with some love for Antonio Moreno in It
• Stevis on baseball in newsreels
• Samurai Frog gives us his top ten films of 1927
• Stevis is back with an "amateur's" take on The General
• Oggs on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
• Cinemathematics on the Harold Lloyd film The Kid Brother
• Brian Darr on the two proto-"best picture" awards at the first Oscars
• Oggs is back with Peter Jackson's reimagining of film history in Forgotten Silver
• Stinkylulu on Pearl McCormack in The Scar of Shame
• Samurai Frog checks in again with Disney's Oswald the Rabbit
• New! Self-Styled Siren on Flesh and the Devil

The "IT" and How to Get It

Screenwriter Anita Loos observed, "If Hollywood hadn't existed, Elinor Glyn would have had to invent it." But it did exist, so Glyn had to content herself with changing it to fit her opinions. Glyn was the British author of scandalous romance novels (her first novel, 1907's Three Weeks, had an unmarried couple cavorting on a tiger-skin rug) who had the gall to give the strongest roles to self-assured women. When Jesse Lasky put out a call in 1920 for well-known authors and playwrights to come write films for him, she accepted, despite having never seen a film before; indeed, according to some, she considered films to be vulgar until she saw one, despite recounting in her autobiography that "I am always proud to think that I was never one of those who belittled the artistic possibilities of the cinematograph industry" (Elinor Glyn, Romantic Adventure. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1937, p. 293). (Of course, she spends the next two pages doing just that.) She took Hollywood by storm, quickly becoming Tinseltown's Grand Dame. Gloria Swanson commented, "Her British dignity was devastating . . . She went everywhere and passed her fearsome verdicts on everything. 'This is glamorous,' she would say. 'This is hideous,' she would say as she baby-stepped through this or that dining room or garden party. People moved aside for her as if she were a sorceress on fire or a giant sting ray" (David Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild. New York: Doubleday, 1988, p. 80-81). Her greatest desire was "to stir up in the cold hearts of the thousands of little fluffy, gold-digging American girls a desire for greater joys in love than are to be found in candy-boxes and car rides and fur coats" (Glyn, 299).

From the opening title card: "IT" is that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With "IT" you win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man. "IT" can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.

Brooklyn-born Clara Bow had come to Hollywood in 1923 after having won a magazine beauty contest. Benjamin Schulberg, former production chief at Paramount and proprietor of indie studio Preferred Pictures, decided she had what it took to be a star, and with his help (and under his thumb) she became one of the biggest stars of silent films. He exploited her ruthlessly, cashing in on her increasing popularity while paying her $200 a week, a pittance compared to what he was earning by loaning her out to other studios. He worked her half to death: she made 36 films between 1922 and 1926, 15 of them coming out in 1925. Most of them were garbage that played a day or two in a town before moving on (Stenn, 44-47). She was plagued by scandals involving her wide-ranging romantic exploits (no, the story about the USC football team probably isn't true, despite what Kenneth Anger said in Hollywood Babylon), including concurrent romances with director Victor Fleming, actor Gilbert Roland, and ne'er-do-well Brian Savage that ended in Savage's theatrical attempted suicide (Stenn, 66-67). After working with Fleming in a starring role in Mantrap (1926), she finally arrived: she strong-armed Schulberg, now back at Paramount mainly because he virtually owned Bow and all the money her films would bring in, into giving her a better contract: a cap on the number of films she'd have to make, an end to the loan-outs that had so overworked her, an exemption from the studio's mandatory morals clause (although they managed to get her on that anyway), and guaranteed star billing. Although she had few scenes in the first Best Picture winner, Wings, she was the only actor billed above the title (Stenn, 71). After filming Wings but before its nationwide release, she met Elinor Glyn.

From Glyn's original story, highlighted in the film: "IT" is that peculiar quality which some persons possess, which attracts others of the opposite sex. The possessor of "IT" must be absolutely un-selfconscious, and must have that magnetic "sex appeal" which is irresistible.

It happened in September 1926. Ben Schulberg was looking for a new Homeric epithet for his star, "The Brooklyn Bonfire" having failed to catch on the year before. He read Glyn's story in Cosmopolitan, and decided to buy it for Clara. Paramount paid the dowager $50,000 to bestow her blessing on Clara; Glyn publicly announced, "Of all the lovely young ladies I've met in Hollywood, Clara Bow has 'It.'" Schulberg arranged an introduction at his office. Glyn was wearing purple chiffon veils. Stenn describes the meeting so well, I'll quote him at length: "So this is Clara Bow," she said, approaching Clara with mincing steps. Once she reached her, Elinor placed both hands upon Clara's head as if it were a crystal ball. "You are my medium, child," she informed Clara gravely. "You are to portray the leading role in my story . . . 'It' is an inner magic, an animal magnetism. Valentino possessed this certain magic. So do John Gilbert and Rex" (p. 82). Rex was a horse. Later, creatures bestowed with Glyn's personal seal of "IT"-ness included Antonio Moreno (cast as the male lead in the film) and the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel.

It turned out that Schulberg had paid Glyn for the concept of "IT" and little else (I'm following the film's combination of capital letters and quotation marks). He ditched the details of her novella, hiring Louis Lighton and Hope Loring to write a new story that would show off Bow's qualities, including her "IT." Clarence Badger was brought in to direct the film, which started shooting on October 7, 1926. It was released in February of 1927 and shattered box-office records. Variety enthused that "Clara Bow really does it all, and how" (Feb. 9, 1927), but not everyone was enthusiastic about the film. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times groused that "although this subject is not annoying, it could never be assured of possessing a fraction of suspense or one iota of subtlety" (Feb. 13, 1927), and Mae Tinee in the Chicago Tribune spent more time talking about the stage show at the theater than about the film, admitting "there's not much to the story, but the acting is clever" (Feb. 8, 1927).

Definition provided by Glyn, who appears in the film as herself: "IT" is self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not—and something in you that gives the impression that you are not all cold.

On the basis of these definitions, Clara Bow does not have "IT," or at least she does not demonstrate in this film, the very one designed to highlight her "IT"-ness. It's there, in that third definition, which, in the film, comes straight from Miss Elinor Glyn's mouth (via a title card): "indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not." Everything about Bow's performance, which is indeed something to see, is designed to be noticed. She plays a shopgirl who wants to attract the attention of the wealthy son of the owner, newly in charge of the store. She engineers meetings, flirts, shows off her legs, drapes herself over his desk, bats her eyelashes, and wiggles. Mostly, she wiggles, all to attract the attention of a man. How, I ask, does this fit with a definition of "IT" that demands "indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not"? Of course, one look at Bow in the film clears everything up: Elinor Glyn's elaboration on "IT" is wrong. Bow has something, and that something must be "IT."

Two months after It was released, Charles Lindberg made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. I don't want to disparage his heroic feat, but he was a little behind the times: Clara Bow had already broken the sound barrier. She's a nonstop ball of energy in It, wiggling, bouncing, rolling her shoulders, kicking up her feet, waving her arms, and generally vibrating fast enough to microwave food she comes into contact with. Adolph Zukor had previously said, "She danced even when her feet were not moving. Some part of her was always in motion, if only her great rolling eyes. It was an elemental magnetism, an animal vitality, that made her the center of attraction in any company" (Stenn, p. 70). There's an extraordinary scene in which she's preparing for her big date—not with the man of her dreams, but with a man who can get her near her dream man. Her audience had come to expect some skin, so we're treated to caressing closeups of her lovely bare shoulders as her friend powders them. All the while, Bow bounces, and it's electrifying. Often I look at female stars from the silent era and completely miss the sex appeal, but with Clara Bow it's immediately apparent why she was so beloved. She had, for lack of a better word, "IT."

She plays Betty Lou, a shopgirl at Waltham's, the biggest department store in town. Antonio Moreno plays Cyrus Waltham, the handsome new boss. The first time she lays eyes on him, she announces her intentions: "Sweet Santa Claus, gimme him!" Bow surprised and irked director Clarence Badger during the shooting of this scene. She gives Waltham a complicated look that caused Badger to yell "Cut!" Demanding an explanation, she told him, "if ya knew your onions like ya was supposedta, you'd know the first look was for the lovesick dames in the audience, and the second look, that passionate stuff, was for the boys an' their poppas, and the third look . . . well, just about the time all them old ladies're shocked an