Movie Roundup: Happy Trails, Blazers Edition

I remain ridiculously far behind, so I'm going to try to speed through some of these.

Bonjour Tristesse - Jean Seberg stars in Otto Preminger's film about a girl trying to break up her father's relationship with an old girlfriend while they all live a decadent rich people life on the Riviera.  David Niven plays her father and Deborah Kerr the girlfriend.  It's like that episode of Mad Men where Don Draper hangs out with rich homeless people in California, but with a bit of The Parent Trap thrown in. It's lovely, the prettiest thing I've seen from Preminger.  The #10 film of 1958.

The Moon is Blue - More Preminger, this a goofy sex comedy with the adorable Maggie McNamera playing a curious, brainy young girl who gets hit on by William Holden and David Niven.  She shocks them with her frank talk about sex (theoretical sex she notes) and various comedic situations ensue.  A fairly successful attempt at bringing the screwball aesthetic into the 50s, it helps that the leads are all pretty charming.  The #17 film of 1953.

Ip Man - Donnie Yen is pretty dour and serious as the Chinese folk hero who resisted the Japanese in a variety of movies (Fist of Fury and Fist of Legend, for two).  The action scenes are, as one would expect from Yen and choreographer Sammo Hung, spectacular.  But the film is really depressing.  Not in a psychotically dark Ong Bak 2 kind of way, that would be more interesting.  More in a self-serious hero-worshiping kind of way.  The #46 film of 2008.

Jewel Robbery - Kay Francis stars as a wealthy woman who hates her husband.  When she's robbed of her latest jewel during a store holdup, she falls for the thief (him being William Powell, this is entirely understandable).  It's a slight, but charming proto-screwball, though I think director William Dieterle doesn't really have the lightness of touch needed to make a film like this soar.  The #29 film of 1932.

Drunken Master - I watched the dubbed version Instant Netflix has of this seminal Jackie Chan film.  Perhaps that's why I found a lot of the comedy pretty lame.  Directed by Yuen Woo-ping, and costarring his father Yuen Siu Tien as the old master who teaches Chan the revolutionary Drunken Style of kung fu, the fights are pretty great, as you'd expect, and the genius of the Drunken Style, invented for this film, (though it has antecedents in traditional martial arts) is undeniable.  I wish I could see it in its proper form, because as is, I found it a little underwhelming.  The #10 film of 1978.

Jane Eyre - The version with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, two of my favorite actors. Welles I can believe as the imperious lord with a secret looked in a closet of his gloomy mansion.  But I'll never understand why Joan Fontaine kept getting these parts where she was supposed to be plain or mousy, instead of stunningly beautiful.  Anyway, the film flits along like it's adapting a book it assumes the audience has read and is therefore able to fill in all the details that make the characters and events interesting.  But I haven't read the book.  I Walked with a Zombie is better.  So is director Robert Stevenson's work with Disney (Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Mary Poppins, etc).  The #16 film of 1943.

Movie Roundup: Three More Weeks of Hell Edition

As this spring's Metro Classics series is winding down, with Seven Samurai playing this week (tickets are going fast!) followed by Night of the Hunter and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I should be able to catch up with the movies I've seen this year (I'm 37 movies behind, at the moment.)  I wrote about some Nicholas Ray films over there a couple weeks ago, and have a little thing on samurai movies going up tomorrow.  Here are the Movies of the Year rankings for the newly seen films:

Run for Cover - 24, 1955
Bitter Victory - 8, 1957
The True Story of Jesse James - 25, 1957
The Savage Innocents - 4, 1960
55 Days at Peking - 21, 1963

Louisiana Story - A stunning film by Robert Flaherty, 25 years after his most famous and influential film, the eskimo documentary Nanook of the North.  He chronicles life in a bayou and the ways that primal existence is altered by the coming of an oil rig.  The film was funded by Standard Oil, so you don't expect it to be particularly polemical against the incursions of heavy industry into nature, but one can't help coming away disturbed by the contrast between the idyllic, though dangerous, environment and the menacing and very very loud machinery of the rig.  Seen through the eyes of a young boy and his pet raccoon, both the bayou and the rig are places for adventure, and at least in this version of the world, able to exist in harmony with each other, for a little while.  Shot by the late Richard Leacock, the film has a mystical kind of beauty that one would associate more with Flaherty's Tabu: A Story of the South Seas collaborator FW Murnau than Leacock's cinéma vérité or the more standard images of Nanook.  The  #7 film of 1948, though that's probably selling it a bit short.

The Furies - Anthony Mann in 1950 may have had the greatest single year for any director ever, certainly for a director in the Western genre.  He began his series with James Stewart with the encyclopedic Winchester '73.  He created one of the greatest and earliest pro-Indian Westerns ever with Devil's Doorway.  And he made this film, a tragic melodrama with Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Huston in his final performance.  Huston plays an aging ranch owner, Stanwyck his daughter.  When Huston buys off the man she loves, hooks up with a golddigger, and declares war on her squatting Mexican friends, she gets her revenge in increasingly cold-blooded ways.  Pointing the way toward the psychological bent Mann would give his Westerns, especially in the Stewart films, The Furies plays up its Freudian complications and allusions to Greek tragedy, going to places far darker and disturbing than most Westerns of its time.  The #9 film of 1950.

Run of the Arrow - Another great progressive Western is this film from Samuel Fuller, the plot of which may be somewhat familiar.  Rod Steiger plays a Civil War veteran who goes West and gets himself adopted into a Sioux tribe.  Inevitably, his new people come into conflict with the US Army, and Steiger, after trying to peacefully resolve things, has to choose which side he's on.  Yup, it's Dances with Wolves, but instead of bloated, self-righteous and condescending, Fuller respects both cultures enough to show both their beauty and their brutality, all within a compact narrative that doesn't waste a single shot and moves forward with a ruthless momentum.  The #10 film of 1957.

The War Game - A harrowing vision of what exactly would happen in the event of a nuclear war, made for the BBC at the height of the Cold War by Peter Watkins (it was pulled from broadcast when, according to wikipedia, the BBC said, "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting." Which sounds about right to me.)  A day by day, hour by hour account of what the attack would look like, what it would do to people near the center of the blast and the primitive state the aftermath of the war would reduce British society to, it's hard to imagine what a more devastating anti-nuke film would look like.  The #8 film of 1965.

Culloden - But that was just a follow-up to another Watkins anti-war film.  A year earlier, he made this document about the 1746 battle in which the Scottish uprising around Charles Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was crushed by British troops, ending 150 years or so of civil war on British soil.  Shot in the style of a TV war report or sporting event (TV tends to treat them the same), the film chronicles the absolute bungle of the battle by the Scottish commanders and the brutal loss of life it caused.  Using the vérité style to film historical recreations, Watkins makes engrossing, wrenching documentaries that a lot of people wouldn't consider documentaries at all, since they use actors and scripts and costumes etc.  That aside, the fact that the same visual style is now used in every cheap History Channel series can hardly be his fault, can it?  Does the History Channel even show these kinds of things anymore?  Regardless, by including the reporter in with the story, as the narrator who can barely disguise his disgust in the case of this film, Watkins further undermines the myth of vérité as objective documentation and raises a host of questions about the way our news media operates today.  These issues are all more fully explored in his masterpiece from 2000 La Commune (Paris, 1871), which I'll get to reviewing hopefully in the next few weeks.  The #10 film of 1964.

RIP Sidney Lumet

RIP Farley Granger

Jazz Binge

What I've been listening to over the last couple of weeks:

Movie Roundup: Beat St. John's Edition

I've fallen way behind in capsulizing here, mostly because I've been spending more time over at the Metro Classics website.  Our latest series started a couple weeks ago, and in conjunction with that I've written about Children of Paradise, Irma Vep and Leaves from Satan's Book, as well as seven Alfred Hitchcock films.  Here are the Movies of the Year rankings for the newly seen films:

Leaves from Satan's Book - 2, 1921

Sabotage - 18, 1936

Saboteur - 18, 1942

Under Capricorn - 3, 1949

Torn Curtain - 16, 1966

Topaz - 11, 1969

Frenzy - 16, 1972

Family Plot - 10, 1976

Holiday Affair - According to TCM, after getting busted for pot, the studio tried to repair Robert Mitchum's reputation by pairing him in a Christmas-themed romantic comedy with Janet Leigh.  Nothing about the resulting film should work, but it does.  Mitchum plays a toy salesman who Leigh gets fired, but he doesn't care because he's such a free spirit (you know, because of the pot).  She's a single mom (war widow) with a boyfriend (Wendell Corey) who's a nice guy but doesn't really set her a-tingle.  The expected result is reached, but with some satisfying twists along the way.  It's the kind of seemingly effortless romantic comedy that has apparently become impossible to make in Hollywood nowadays.  We watched it on Christmas, which should tell you how far behind I am.  The #18 film of 1949.

Susan Slept Here - Another Christmas movie, this one directed by Frank Tashlin and starring Debbie Reynolds as a juvenile delinquent (seriously) who gets deposited on the doorstep of Dick Powell (who we are supposed to believe is 35, but was actually 50 at the time, which is a relief, because I turn 35 this year) a screenwriter with writer's block (the friendly cops think her life story will inspire him).  Instead, Reynolds causes havoc in Powell's life because everyone thinks they're romantically involved, including his evil fiancée (Anne Francis).  And when Reynolds and Powell get married in Vegas, things get really zany.  It's a fun film, and Tashlin keeps things more interesting than you'd expect from a film based on a play that's set almost entirely in one apartment, and Powell fits the material better than you'd think he would, though, like with The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, I think Jack Lemmon would have been better.   The #18 film of 1954.

The World of Henry Orient - A very sweet coming of age film set in a fantasy world New York where two pretty teenaged girls are free to pretty much run all over the city with no horrible consequences.  They develop a crush on concert pianist Henry (played by Peter Sellers) and start stalking him, which repeatedly complicates his attempts to sleep with a married woman and twists him into a paranoid frenzy.  It has all the emotional sincerity and darkness of adolescence, especially in the girls' contrasting relationships with their parents, and the two leads, Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth are very good.  The #14 film of 1964.

September Affair - Joan Fontaine meets Joseph Cotton in Rome, and the two spend a day sightseeing and miss their flight home to New York.  When that plane crashes, they decide to not tell their families they are alive (Cotton is unhappily married) and have a luxurious affair.  This being Hollywood, of course, this can't last.  It's another lovely, solid studio film, with a real undercurrent of post-war melancholy (the kind that film noir exploited so well in this era).  And it features Walter Huston singing, which is as awesome as it sounds.  The #21 film of 1950.

Caught - A distinguished entry in the woman marries a rich guy who turns out to be a sadistic creep genre, directed by the great Max Ophuls.  Barbara Bel Geddes (Vertigo) plays the woman, an aspiring actress who marries millionaire Robert Ryan.  After years of emotional abuse, she runs off and gets a job as a receptionist for James Mason's swell doctor.  Mason and Bel Geddes fall in love (naturally) and so must deal with crazy Robert Ryan.  And somebody's pregnant!  Probably my least favorite Ophuls (Joan Fontaine or Joan Bennett probably would have been better here), but it's still a very good melo-noir.  The #11 film of 1949.

Withnail & I - In 1969, Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann flee their creditors to the countryside, where they drink a prodigious amount of alcohol and do their best to avoid the amorous advances of Richard Griffiths (a plotline that's rarely pleasant, though Griffiths does his best to make a humane character out of it).  It's an occasionally lovely movie about ugly people who live in an ugly, mud-splattered world, the hangover after the Swinging 60s.  Grant, an actor I've always liked, though he's in a lot of bad movies, gives his best performance as Withnail, a loud and obnoxious agent of chaos who may or may not also be pure evil.  The #10 film of 1987.

Movies of the Year Awards 2010

See the post below for the nominees:


Best Picture:

Endy: Certified Copy
Oscar: The King's Speech

Best Director:

Endy: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Oscar: Tom Hooper, The King's Speech

Actor:

Endy: Edgar Ramirez, Carlos
Oscar: Colin Firth, The King's Speech

Actress:

Endy: Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy
Oscar: Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Supporting Actor:

Endy: John Hawkes, Winter's Bone
Oscar: Christian Bale, The Fighter

Supporting Actress:

Endy: Greta Gerwig, Greenberg
Oscar: Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Original Screenplay:

Endy: Hong Sangsoo, Oki's Movie & Hahaha
Oscar: David Seidler, The King's Speech

Adapted Screenplay:

Endy: Joel & Ethan Coen, True Grit
Oscar: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Foreign Language Film:

Endy: Certified Copy
Oscar: In a Better World

Documentary Feature:

Endy: Exit Through the Gift Shop
Oscar: Inside Job

Documentary Short:

Endy: The Indian Boundary Line

Oscar: Strangers No More

Live Action Short:

Endy: 607

Oscar: God of Love

Animated Short:

Endy: Day & Night

Oscar: The Lost Thing

Animated Feature:

Endy: The Illusionist
Oscar: Toy Story 3

Film Editing:

Endy: Carlos
Oscar: The Social Network

Cinematography:

Endy: Roger Deakins, True Grit
Oscar: Wally Pfister, Inception

Art Direction:

Endy: Carlos
Oscar: Alice in Wonderland

Costume Design:

Endy: The Social Network
Oscar: Alice in Wonderland

Make-Up:

Endy: Black Swan
Oscar: The Wolfman

Sound:

Endy: Black Swan
Oscar: Inception

Sound Editing:

Endy: True Grit
Oscar: Inception

Visual Effects:

Endy: Inception
Oscar: Inception

Original Score:

Endy: The Illusionist
Oscar: The Social Network

Soundtrack:

Endy: Carlos

Movies of the Year Award Nominations: 2010

With Oscar night fast approaching, it's time to hand out my own awards for the past movie year.  As always, only films with an imdb date of 2010 are eligible, which means this will include a lot of films that haven't been released theatrically in the US yet.

These are the nominees, I'll have the winners up on Monday, to compare with the Oscar winners.  For my Oscar predictions, check out the Metro Classics website.

Best Picture:

1. Carlos
2. Certified Copy
3. Exit Through the Gift Shop
4. Oki's Movie
5. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Best Director:

1. Olivier Assays, Carlos

2. Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy

3. Hong Sangsoo, Hahaha & Oki's Movie

4. Joel & Ethan Coen, True Grit

5. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee

Best Actor:

1. James Franco, 127 Hours

2. Edgar Ramirez, Carlos

3. John Chang, The Drunkard

4. Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island & Inception

5. Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network

Best Actress:

1. Natalie Portman, Black Swan

2. Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

3. Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy

4. Yun Junghee, Poetry

5. Emma Stone, Easy A

Supporting Actor:

1. Christoph Bach, Carlos

2. Teddy Robin, Gallants & Merry Go Round
3. Mark Ruffalo, The Kids are All Right & Shutter Island

4. Kieran Culkin, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

5. John Hawkes, Winter's Bone

Supporting Actress:

1. Wei Wei, The Drunkard

2. Olivia Williams, The Ghost Writer

3. Greta Gerwig, Greenberg
4. Rosamund Pike, Made in Dagenham

5. Rooney Mara, The Social Network

Original Screenplay:

1. Olivier Assayas, Dan Franck & Daniel Leconte, Carlos

2. Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy

3. Zhu Wen, Thomas Mao

4. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee

5. Hong Sangsoo, Oki's Movie & Hahaha

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Freddie Wong, The Drunkard

2. Sylvain Chomet, The Illusionist

3. Catherine Breillat, The Sleeping Beauty

4. Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

5. Joel & Ethan Coen, True Grit

Foreign Language Film:

1. Carlos

2. Certified Copy

3. Oki's Movie

4. Thomas Mao

5. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Documentary Feature:

1. Exit Through the Gift Shop

2. I Wish I Knew

3. Get Out of the Car

4. Sweetgrass

5. Strange Powers

Animated Feature:

1. The Illusionist

2. Toy Story 3

Film Editing:

1. 127 Hours

2. Black Swan

3. Carlos

4. Exit Through the Gift Shop

5. Shutter Island

Cinematography:

1. Matthew Libatique, Black Swan

2. Denis Lenoir & Yorick Le Soux, Carlos
3. Luca Bigazzi, Certified Copy

4. Jeff Cronenweth, The Social Network

5. Roger Deakins, True Grit

Art Direction:

1. Carlos

2. Certified Copy

3. Shutter Island

4. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

5. Uncle Boonmee

Costume Design:

1. Carlos

2. Certified Copy

3. The Sleeping Beauty

4. The Social Network

5. True Grit

Make-up:

1. 127 Hours

2. Black Swan

3. Shutter Island

Sound Mixing:

1. 127 Hours

2. Black Swan

3. Shutter Island

4. The Social Network

5. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Sound Editing:

1. Kick Ass
2. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

3. Shutter Island

4. Toy Story 3
5. True Grit

Visual Effects:

1. 127 Hours

2. Inception

3. Gallants

4. Predators

5. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Original Score:

1. 127 Hours

2. The Illusionist
3. Never Let Me Go

4. The Social Network
5. True Grit

Soundtrack:

1. Black Swan

2. Carlos

3. Shutter Island

4. Strange Powers

5. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World