2011

Now that the Oscars are done with, it's past time I release a best Films of 2011 list.  This is even more preliminary than usual this year, as I haven't had much chance to see new movies and I missed the Vancouver Film festival for the first time in several years.  Thus, I've only seen 24 films from 2011 so far, but that will change and this list will be updated as it does.  I've included links to reviews of the films I've written about.  Eventually there will be something for everything, but that's a long-term project.

1. The Tree of Life

2. Drive

3. The Muppets

4. Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown

5. Hugo

6. War Horse

7. Midnight in Paris

8. The Adventures of Tintin

9. Winnie the Pooh

10. The Artist

11. Moneyball

12. Super 8

13. The Guard

14. Thor

15. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

16. Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films

17. Attack the Block

18. Don't Expect Too Much

19. The Adjustment Bureau

20. Page One: Inside the New York Times

21. Cedar Rapids

22. Rango

23. Captain America

24. These Amazing Shadows

Oscarfever! 2012: Predictions and Endy Award Winners

It's once again time for my annual highly mediocre, guaranteed to finish in the top 5 but definitely not win your pool Oscar Predictions.  As always, my guess are paired with my own personal award for each category, The Endy.  The Endys follow different rules than the Oscars because only actual 2011 films are eligible, which excludes such luminaries as Certified Copy, Meek's Cutoff, Carlos, Mysteries of Lisbon, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and many others which all first saw release in 2010.  This year was an unusually light one for me movie-wise, as the Best of the Year list (to be posted this evening) will attest, and some of the Endy categories (I haven't seen any 2011 foreign language films!) are a bit lacking.

Best Picture:

Endy: The Tree of Life

Oscar: The Artist

Best Director:

Endy: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life

Oscar: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Actor:

Endy: Brendan Gleeson, The Guard

Oscar: Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Actress:

Endy: Marion Cotillard, Midnight in Paris

Oscar: Viola Davis, The Help

Supporting Actor:

Endy: Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life

Oscar: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Supporting Actress:

Endy: Helen McCrory, Hugo

Oscar: Bérénice Bejo, The Artist

Original Screenplay:

Endy: Jason Segel & Nicholas Stoller, The Muppets

Oscar: Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

Adapted Screenplay:

Endy: Craig Schultz & Stephan Pastis, Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown

Oscar: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, The Descendants

Foreign Language Film:

Endy: NA

Oscar: A Separation

Documentary Feature:

Endy: Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films

Oscar: Paradise Lost 3

Animated Feature:

Endy: Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown

Oscar: Rango

Film Editing:

Endy: The Tree of Life

Oscar: The Artist

Cinematography:

Endy: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life

Oscar: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life

Art Direction:

Endy: Hugo

Oscar: Hugo

Costume Design:

Endy: Midnight in Paris

Oscar: The Artist

Make-Up:

Endy: Super 8

Oscar: The Iron Lady

Sound Mixing:

Endy: The Tree of Life

Oscar: Hugo

Sound Editing:

Endy: Drive

Oscar: War Horse

Visual Effects:

Endy: Hugo

Oscar: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Original Score:

Endy: Alexandre Desplat, The Tree of Life

Oscar: Ludovic Bource, The Artist

Original Song:

Endy: "Man or Muppet", The Muppets

Oscar: "Man or Muppet", The Muppets

Documentary Short:

Oscar: Saving Face

Animated Short:

Oscar: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Live Action Short:

Oscar: The Shore

Soundtrack:

Endy: The Tree of Life

Oscarfever! 2012: Best Picture Lists

In honor of tomorrow's big show, here's a couple big Oscar-related lists for the day.  First, I've ranked all 76 of the Best Picture winners I've seen:

1. Casablanca   

2. Annie Hall

3. Sunrise

4. All About Eve

5. An American in Paris

6. Gone With the Wind

7. My Fair Lady

8. Unforgiven

9. The Godfather Part II

10. Lawrence of Arabia

11. Amadeus

12. On the Waterfront

13. The French Connection

14. The Godfather

15. It Happened One Night

16. The Best Years of Our Lives

17. Rebecca

18. All Quiet on the Western Front

19. The Apartment

20. How Green Was My Valley

21. The English Patient

22. The Departed

23. West Side Story

24. Patton

25. Wings

26. Gigi

27. The Sting

28. No Country for Old Men

29. Going My Way

30. Out of Africa

31. Mutiny on the Bounty

32. Hamlet

33. Midnight Cowboy

34. The Bridge on the River Kwai

35. The Silence of the Lambs

36. Platoon

37. The Return of the King

38. The Last Emperor

39. Schindler's List

40. The Deer Hunter

41. All the King's Men

42. Rocky

43. The Hurt Locker

44. Titanic

45. Marty

46. Ordinary People

47. Ben-Hur

48. You Can't Take It With You

49. In the Heat of the Night

50. Slumdog Millionaire

51. Terms of Endearment

52. Shakespeare in Love

53. Braveheart

54. The Broadway Melody

55. Oliver!

56. Grand Hotel

57. Dances with Wolves

58. A Man for All Seasons

59. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

60. The King's Speech

61. Kramer vs. Kramer

62. American Beauty

63. Gandhi

64. The Lost Weekend

65. Cimarron

66. Forrest Gump

67. Million Dollar Baby

68. Chariots of Fire

69. The Sound of Music

70. Rain Man

71. Gladiator

72. Cavalcade

73. A Beautiful Mind

74. Gentlemen's Agreement

75. Driving Miss Daisy

76. Crash

 The seven winners I haven't seen yet are: The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola

Mrs. Miniver, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, Tom Jones,  and Chicago.

Second, a list of all the actual winners in chronological order, followed in parentheses by the actual nominee I would have picked (limited of course by the films I've seen) and my personal choice as Best Picture.  I'm following as best I can the Oscar eligibility rules for Hollywood films (foreign film release dates are too complicated, so for the sake of this exercise, let's just assume that films have been released simultaneously in all parts of the world).  

Looking at this list, it's reassuring how many great movies have been nominated for Best Picture, even if the eventual winners were lackluster.  18 times my favorite of the year was one of the nominees, with my favorite winning six times (Sunrise, Casablanca, All About Eve, An American in Paris, Annie Hall and Unforgiven).  If The Tree of Life pulls off a huge upset tomorrow, it'll be the seventh.

27/28: Sunrise/Wings (Sunrise, Sunrise)

28/29: The Broadway Melody (The Broadway Melody, The Docks of New York)

29/30: All Quiet on the Western Front (All Quiet on the Western Front, The Man with a Movie Camera)

30/31: Cimarron (The Front Page, City Lights)

31/32: Grand Hotel (Shanghai Express, Trouble in Paradise)

32/33: Cavalcade (42nd Street, Duck Soup)

1934: It Happened One Night (The Thin Man, L'Atalante)

1935: Mutiny on the Bounty (Top Hat, Top Hat)

1936: The Great Ziegfeld (Dodsworth, Swing Time)

1937: The Life of Emile Zola (The Awful Truth, Make Way For Tomorrow)

1938: You Can't Take It with You (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Bringing Up Baby)

1939: Gone with the Wind (Stagecoach, The Rules of the Game)

1940: Rebecca (The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner)

1941: How Green Was My Valley (Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane)

1942: Mrs. Miniver (The Magnificent Ambersons, Cat People)

1943: Casablanca (Casablanca, Casablanca)

1944: Going My Way (Double Indemnity, A Canterbury Tale)

1945: The Lost Weekend (The Bells of St. Mary's, Children of Paradise)

1946: The Best Years of Our Lives (It's a Wonderful Life, The Big Sleep)

1947: Gentlemen's Agreement (Crossfire, Black Narcissus)

1948: Hamlet (The Red Shoes, The Red Shoes)

1949: All the King's Men (A Letter to Three Wives, The Third Man)

1950: All About Eve (All About Eve, All About Eve)

1951: An American in Paris (An American in Paris, An American in Paris)

1952: The Greatest Show on Earth (The Quiet Man, Singin' in the Rain)

1953: From Here to Eternity (Roman Holiday, Ugetsu)

1954: On the Waterfront (On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai)

1955: Marty (Mister Roberts, Night of the Hunter)

1956: Around the World in 80 Days (The Ten Commandments, The Searchers)

1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai (Witness for the Prosecution, Funny Face)

1958: Gigi (Gigi, Vertigo)

1959: Ben-Hur (Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest)

1960: The Apartment (The Apartment, Psycho)

1961: West Side Story (West Side Story, A Woman is a Woman)

1962: Lawrence of Arabia (Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)

1963: Tom Jones (How the West Was Won, The Birds)

1964: My Fair Lady (Dr. Strangelove, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)

1965: The Sound of Music (Dr. Zhivago, Pierrot le fou)

1966: A Man for All Seasons (A Man for All Seasons, Au hasard Balthazar)

1967: In the Heat of the Night (Bonnie & Clyde, Playtime)

1968: Oliver! (The Lion in Winter, Once Upon a Time in the West)

1969: Midnight Cowboy (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, A Touch of Zen)

1970: Patton (Patton, Claire's Knee)

1971: The French Connection (The French Connection, Two-Lane Blacktop)

1972: The Godfather (Cabaret, Cabaret)

1973: The Sting (The Sting, F for Fake)

1974: The Godfather Part II (Chinatown, Celine & Julie Go Boating)

1975: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Jaws, Jaws)

1976: Rocky (Taxi Driver, Taxi Driver)

1977: Annie Hall (Annie Hall, Annie Hall)

1978: The Deer Hunter (The Deer Hunter, Days of Heaven)

1979: Kramer vs. Kramer (All that Jazz, Manhattan)

1980: Ordinary People (Raging Bull, The Empire Strikes Back)

1981: Chariots of Fire (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Raiders of the Lost Ark)

1982: Gandhi (The Verdict, Fitzcarraldo)

1983: Terms of Endearment (The Right Stuff, Sans soleil)

1984: Amadeus (Amadeus, Stranger than Paradise)

1985: Out of Africa (Out of Africa, Ran)

1986: Platoon (Hannah and her Sisters, Hannah and Her Sisters)

1987: The Last Emperor (Broadcast News, The Princess Bride)

1988: Rain Man (Dangerous Liaisons, Dangerous Liaisons)

1989: Driving Miss Daisy (Field of Dreams, Do the Right Thing)

1990: Dances with Wolves (Goodfellas, Miller's Crossing)

1991: Silence of the Lambs (JFK, Slacker)

1992: Unforgiven (Unforgiven, Unforgiven)

1993: Schindler's List (In the Name of the Father, Three Colors: Blue)

1994: Forrest Gump (Pulp Fiction, Chungking Express)

1995: Braveheart (Sense & Sensibility, Dead Man)

1996: The English Patient (The English Patient, Transpotting)

1997: Titanic (Titanic, Boogie Nights)

1998: Shakespeare in Love (The Thin Red Line, The Big Lebowski)

1999: American Beauty (The Insider, Eyes Wide Shut)

2000: Gladiator (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)

2001: A Beautiful Mind (The Fellowship of the Ring, Millennium Mambo)

2002: Chicago (The Two Towers, Punch-Drunk Love)

2003: Return of the King (Master and Commander, Kill Bill Vol. 1)

2004: Million Dollar Baby (The Aviator, 2046)

2005: Crash (Munich, The New World)

2006: The Departed (The Departed, The Wind that Shakes the Barley)

2007: No Country for Old Men (There Will Be Blood, I'm Not There)

2008: Slumdog Millionaire (Milk, WALL-E)

2009: The Hurt Locker (Inglourious Basterds, Inglourious Basterds)

2010: The King's Speech (True Grit, Certified Copy)

2011: ??? ?????? (The Tree of Life, The Tree of Life)

This Week in Rankings

Where the movies I've watched and rewatched over the last week line up on The Big List.

The Floorwalker - 3, 1916

The Rink - 2, 1916

Bardelys the Magnificent - 3, 1926

Cimarron - 16, 1931

Cavalcade - 27, 1933

Comrade X - 14, 1940

Once Upon a Honeymoon - 5, 1942

Cimarron - 19, 1960

Cedar Rapids - 2011

The Adventures of Tintin - 2011

The Guard - 2011

Winnie the Pooh - 2011

On The Adventures of Tintin

I really enjoyed this and I'm not sure why it doesn't seem to be as popular as it should.  I fear it's because Tintin isn't a typical Hollywood hero in that he doesn't have some kind of psychological crisis he overcomes through his adventure.  Capt. Haddock has his addiction arc, but not a whole lot of melodrama is wrung out of that, and Tintin's relation to it is simple disapproval.  Tintin doesn't have a "character" that "develops" in the way we're used to seeing, even kids' movies invariably have some lame redemption or parental anxiety story grafted onto them.

This is, I think, why it hearkens back to the first Indiana Jones film as much as in Spielberg's brilliantly designed action set pieces.  Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't have character to speak of: Indiana Jones and Marion are types out of 40s Hollywood (the first a combination of Bogart and Flynn, the second a classic Hawksian woman) and their rudimentary romance merely serves to break up the action sequences.  They don't develop, they are entertainment devices that are run through a plot in the manner of classic serials and adventure films.

This, then, is the truly old fashioned Spielberg film of 2011, not the thoroughly modernist War Horse.  The two films make an interesting pair, as inevitably happens when Spielberg releases two films in the same year, always opposing versions of himself (Schindler's List and Jurassic Park in 1993, Munich and War of the Worlds in 2005, Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can in 2002, Amistad and The Lost World in 1997, Always and The Last Crusade in 1989).  In almost every one of those years, I prefer the Genre Spielberg to the Prestige Spielberg.  2005 is pretty close: both Munich and WotW are very good movies with really awful scenes near the end.  War Horse has more greatness in it (the last hour or so), but also more terribleness (the first hour or so).  Tintin is consistently good throughout, but it feels like it's missing something.

It's the work of a master, with beautifully conceived and executed action sequences and it is always entertaining.  Formally, the film is a wonder, not just in managing to (barely) overcome the inherent uncanny valley issues of its medium.  Spielberg creates some of the most clever and beautiful dissolves seen in years, and there's a visual motif of reflective surfaces (mirrors, glass, water, etc) that is unmatched in any animation I've seen.  To what end I'm not sure: why is Tintin hounded by so many distortions of reality?  Is it merely because it looks really cool?  I think so, and that gets to what I think the film is missing.  It's a well-told story that is all surface; it lacks the inspiration, the edge, the danger of genius.  It's a more accomplished film than something like Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Carribean films, but I prefer the crazy energy of those films, the willingness to go completely off the rails to risk making a great movie.  War Horse comes close to that, Tintin plays it safe.

1904

1. The Cook in Trouble - A trick film from Georges Méliès, much less ambitious in scope than his epics of the previous two years, with only one set (albeit a lovely one) and no real narrative to speak of.  It's more a fun diversion than anything revolutionary.  A cook is mean to a beggar asking for food.  The beggar is a wizard in disguise who curses the cook, inflicting him with demons that terrorize him, jumping in and out of his pots and crawling out of his oven in a devilish swirl of stop action photographic effects.

This Week in Rankings

Watches and rewatches from last week, and where each film currently places on The Big List.

Grand Hotel - 35, 1932

State Fair - 17, 1933

The Great Garrick - 24, 1937

Merrily We Live - 10, 1938

The Great Waltz - 12, 1938

Second Fiddle - 31, 1939

That Uncertain Feeling - 21, 1941

A Song to Remember - 23, 1945

On the Town - 9, 1949

It's Always Fair Weather - 11, 1955

Lust for Life - 17, 1956

Ice Station Zebra - 18, 1968

Mysteries of Lisbon - 2, 2010

The Laurel & Hardy Project #5: Slipping Wives

This is the first real showcase in the series for Stan Laurel.  He was pretty good in Duck Soup, but he and Oliver Hardy were together in almost every scene there and in was their interactions that made it work.  They both appear in this film, and again have some great comic moments together, but Laurel is also given a solo showcase where he gets to display the physical comedy talents that made him a star in the first place.

The film is a star vehicle for Priscilla Dean, a major star at Universal in the late-teens and early 20s who had faded into two reelers for Roach by 1927.  Laurel and Hardy are the next billed, followed by Herbert Rawlinson, an actor whose career began before World War I and ended with Ed Wood in the 1950s.  It's a fairly typical farce scenario where Priscilla hires Laurel's paint salesman to help her make her husband (Rawlinson) jealous. Hardy plays the butler who takes an immediate dislike to Laurel.  Most of the comedy is built around Laurel mistaken a family friend for the husband, and thus doing all his flirting when the husband isn't looking.  The highlight scene for Laurel is when he's asked about his latest novel (he's posing as a famous author) and he demonstrates the story of Samson and Delilah.  Laurel started out in British music halls (he was for a time Charlie Chaplin's understudy, when Chaplin toured America for the first time, Laurel was part of his troupe) and he here gets to display a Chaplinesque pantomime skill, an ability I didn't know he had before watching these movies.  I assumed his genius was more for the construction of anarchic comedy sequence, slow burns to chaos, but he shows here a real talent for the more balletic forms of comedy as well.

Coming Soon

The Laurel & Hardy Project #4: Duck Soup

The first-ever on-screen pairing of Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, though they were not yet an official comedy team.  The Roach Studio was at the time shuffling its various actors through all kinds of permutations, and it was apparently Leo McCarey who saw the potential of the Laurel & Hardy combination.  McCarey was the supervising director of this film, and though he's most famous for his talking films like The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, An Affair to Remember, The Bells of St. Marys and the Marx Brothers classic that borrows the title of this short, he was very influential in silent comedy at Roach, working with Our Gang and Charley Chase in addition to Laurel & Hardy as a writer, director and "supervising director".

It was in the latter role that McCarey worked on this film, based on a play by Laurel's father, Arthur J. Jefferson.  Stan and Ollie play a pair of tramps on the run from park rangers who want to draft them to help fight a raging forest fire.  They flee into an empty mansion (the owner is on vacation) and set up residence, only to be forced to pose as owner and butler when prospective sub-letees arrive to tour the place.  When the real owner, a blustery madman of a hunter who looks like a psychotic Teddy Roosevelt, shows up, chaos reigns.  Eventually, the boys end up at the fire, whipped into the air by an overpowering fire hose in a brief, beautiful image of freedom and karmic punishment.

Two Composers: On A Song to Remember and The Great Waltz

The composer biopic is an increasingly infrequent subset of a genre that wins many Oscars and garners little critical respect.  Increasingly infrequent as the audience for classical music dwindles of course: the rock/pop biopic is alive and well, from the highs of Todd Haynes's I'm Not There to the lows of Ray and Walk the Line.  The last composer biopic I recall gaining a lot of attention was the thoroughly mediocre Gary Oldman-as-Beethoven film, Immortal Beloved.  The undisputed king of the genre remains Amadeus, a remarkable film considering the fact that it is both a biopic and a Best Picture winner and really, really good, all at the same time (and also the subject of a blogathon, starting today).

Back in the day, though, mass audiences actually listened to classical music, and Hollywood dutifully provided fanciful life stories for famous composers in films that function as solid greatest hits collections as well as Best Actor Oscar bait.  The two films I watched this week, Charles Vidor's Chopin film A Song to Remember and Julien Duvivier's The Great Waltz, about Johann Strauss II are even better than that, though their relation to actual history is dubious, as is to be expected in this genre.

A Song to Remember anticipates Amadeus's trick of telling the story of the genius at its center through a secondary character, in this case, Chopin's teacher Professor Elsner, played by Paul Muni (Scarface himself).  The film begins with Chopin (Cornell Wilde, Oscar nominee, with the excellent José Iturbi, the quest object of Anchors Aweigh, playing the piano parts) as a young man in Poland playing the piano and committed to radical anti-Russian politics (as it was more often than not in its history, Poland was then being ruled by a foreign power).  At a big recital at a rich nobleman's house (Chopin performs right after Paganini, giving us an early example of that wonderful biopic tradition: playing the spot-the-famous-person game), Chopin angrily denounces the new Russian governor-general.

Fleeing the Tsarist thugs, Chopin and Elsner take off for Paris where, Chopin quickly makes friends with Franz Liszt and George Sand.  Liszt is a fellow pianist-composer, and the first person other than Elsner to recognize Chopin's genius.  His first concert in Paris goes poorly as Chopin learns just before going on that some of his revolutionary comrades have been tortured to death for helping him escape.  He breaks down in the midst of the recital, angrily pounding a fragment of his "Heroic" Polonaise before storming off-stage.  Fortunately, Liszt and Sand arrange a second chance for him to impress the Paris intelligentsia, inspiring a lovely sequence where they tell the audience Liszt will perform, but only with all the lights doused.  We see the snooty audience carried away by the beautiful playing, only to have Liszt walk in with a candelabra and reveal that the lowly Chopin was the performer all along.

So far, this is all conventional rise-of-the-artist territory, but the film takes a turn in the second half.  Chopin and Sand run away together, first to her country castle, then to Majorca.  Sand convinces him that he's better off with her, composing music and not interacting with other human beings, especially not the poor freedom-seeking Polish people.  As played by Merle Oberon, she's a vampiric figure, sucking the life out of Chopin while at the same time espousing a Randian contempt for the masses and belief in the superiority of the artist.  We see Chopin's degeneration, first spiritual, then physical, over time from the perspective of Elsner, his abandoned mentor, reduced to living and teaching piano in a cheap hovel and hoping Chopin return to sanity, his friend and teacher and his political commitments.  But though these characters, Sand and Elsner, are opposing forces fighting for Chopin's soul, both are complicated figures.  Elsner is blinded by pride and self-righteousness from taking any practical action to confront Chopin and Sand, in a characterization striking in its sympathy for the villain, is shown to have very real reasons behind her hard philosophy, reasons rooted in the patriarchal system that forced her to adopt a man's name to make any headway in the literary world.  Her struggle has twisted her into a strident individualist, but we see the causality correctly: she's the villain not because she's independent (as is the way many liberated women are portrayed as evil throughout film history, up to and including our own time), but because the struggle to make herself independent has twisted her into a villain.  The fault lies not with independence, but with the system that limited her in the first place.  We are therefore able to embrace her feminism while denouncing the objectivist ideology she cloaks it in.  She's lost her compassion, but not her humanity.  Such nuanced figures aren't often to be found in contemporary Hollywood films, where we're more likely to get a simple caricature like the nagging wet-blanket girlfriend/housewife holding the hero back from doing the thing that makes him interesting (see for example, every sports movie ever).

Eventually, Elsner convinces Chopin to recommit himself to his people and he embarks on a big European tour.  But his health is failing and, as Sand predicted, the passion with which he throws himself into his performances makes it worse.  He's literally playing himself to death, but heroically so because his music, and the revenue it generates, is being funneled to the revolutionary struggle back home.  That the film was made and released in the midst of World War II crystalizes the ideology of struggle and sacrifice at its propagandistic heart.  Like most of the best biopics, it's not a film about its subject, but a film about an idea that it uses the life of the subject to illustrate.

The Great Waltz provides entirely different kinds of pleasures, however.  Though a reviewer at imdb has an interesting theory that the film is an allegory for the Nazi annexation of Austria, which was on-going at the time of the film's release in 1938, I'd have to say that political concerns are far from the main attraction of the film.  Plot-wise, it marries a traditional rise-to-greatness narrative with a love triangle plot.  Young Strauss, a banker, gets fired for writing waltzes when he should be working.  He gets his friend's together and forms an orchestra, the first performance of which is sparsely attended (only his fiancee and family) until a group of rich swells swirling around opera star Carla Donner (real-life opera star Miliza Korjus, Oscar-nominated) shows up.  Suddenly, the Viennese people in the nearby square take notice of Strauss's music and the hall soon overflows with eager dancers.  Overnight, Strauss has become a smashing success, the mid-19th century version of Lennon-McCartney, cranking out wildly popular tune after tune, in turn transforming the waltz from a scandalous, low form of dance to the music of the Austrian soul.

All of this, like in A Song to Remember, is played against the backdrop of revolution.  Strauss is a big supporter of the Austrian democracy movement (he wrote the march they march to).  During a protest, he and Donner are forced to flee together into the Vienna Woods, where they compose "Tales from the Vienna Woods" in the film's most famous and brilliant sequence.  The two are riding a carriage in the early morning, and we hear through Strauss's ears as the sounds of the woods (farmers singing at work, birds chirping, the horse's hooves clomping) are transformed by his genius; how Strauss harmonizes the everyday sound of the world and makes it sing.  This sequence at the heart of the film concludes with Strauss and Donner falling in love (his now wife now also forgotten) and dancing a delierious waltz around a pavilion at the center of the woods (Duvivier uses a nice high angle to capture the dizzying romance of a high speed waltz, the most glorious and cinematic of ballroom dances) while at the same time it is announced that the revolution is won and an new Emperor is in power (how an Emperor fulfills a democratic revolution is left unclear, I don't recall the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a particularly democratic institution).

The last third of the film is not quite as perfect as the middle section, but it does provide an excellent showcase for Luise Rainer, the ostensible star of the film, as Strauss's wife Poldi.  Strauss and Donner have been carrying on their affair more or less in public during preparation for her starring role in his Imperially-commisioned opera, "Die Fledermaus".  Donner's lover, Lionel Atwill as Count Hohenfried, visits Poldi and inspires her to fight for her husband, she'd been loving him too much to call him out on his infidelity.  She runs to the opera and, after seeing him and Donner happily together, wishes them well on their future endeavors.  This effectively guilts Strauss into remaining home with his wife, though his love for Donner lives on in the spirit of the Blue Danube.  These scenes wouldn't work nearly as well without Rainer's performance, tight-lipped and stiff-jawed, she barely moves her mouth as she speaks, breathy and intense as if she really believes every ridiculous thing she is given to say like it was as much an expression of her soul as Chopin's music was of his.

In the end, The Great Waltz is less serious, less of a "good film" than A Song to Remember, but I suspect it's the one that will stick longer in my memory.  A Song to Remember has the fascinating figure of Oberon's George Sand tearing apart the neat edges of its formulas, and the powerhouse playing of José Iturbi pounding the Polonaise into your brain, but the Vienna Woods sequences of The Great Waltz reach for something far greater than ideology.  They get to the core of the power and beauty of music, and do so in a way that is only possible in film.

The Laurel & Hardy Project #3: 45 Minutes from Hollywood

The most delightful film yet, this is another Glenn Tryon vehicle, though it does also feature both Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel, albeit not in the same scene.  This was their second time appearing in the same film, the first was way back in 1921.  Tryon plays a young man sent to Hollywood to pay a bill (or his family loses the farm or something).  Blinded by movie-love, he assumes the bank robbery he witnesses is in fact a movie set and ends up in a hotel having switched clothes with the crook and on the run from the law.  He gets tangled up with Hardy, playing the hotel detective (changing clothes again into the detective's wife's outfit, leading to accusations of adultery for poor Hardy).  Laurel is unrecognizable behind a big bushy mustache in a brief scene as a hotel guest whose bed is invaded by interlopers.  Janet Gaynor apparently appears as a hotel guest, but I didn't catch her.

1903

1. The Great Train Robbery - Along with A Trip to the Moon, the most famous of the early, early silent films, and generally credited as the first film Western and the greatest film by pioneer director Edwin S. Porter.  The story couldn't be simpler: bandits hold up a train, a posse is formed, the bad guys are killed in a shootout.  The film's most audacious moment is its last, a non-diegetic medium shot of a bandit firing his gun directly into the camera, one of the most oft-imitated images in film, you can see it reenacted again and again, from Sylvia Sydney in Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets to Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.  But that's not its only canny use of developing technique.  There's a subtle double exposure composite shot in the opening scene and again on the train, some actual camera movement (short tilts and pans in the woods) and cross-cutting of the kind that would form the basis of modern continuity editing.  Compare George Méliès's tableaux style where the entirety of a scene plays out in one shot, then the next scene takes place in another location, later in time.  Porter instead cuts within a location within a scene and between actions at different locations occurring at the same time.  This system, which allows for much more dynamic and diverse story-telling possibilities than the Méliès system, was refined over the next few years and forms the foundation of all modern editing.

2. The Kingdom of Fairies - Even more ambitious in scope and design than A Trip to the Moon, this is the ultimate in Méliès epics.  At every level of production, the film is stunning.  The story is pretty basic: princess is kidnapped by evil witch, prince journeys to the rescue, lots of magic items and fancy movie tricks ensue (including some breath-taking and hilarious underwater scenes).  It's not as much a step forward as it is a consolidation of the advances Méliès had already made over the previous years (double exposure, multi-plane set design, stop-motion effects, fanciful costumes and tinting, etc).  So while it isn't the cinematic milestone that The Great Train Robbery is, it is still absolutely gorgeous.

3. The Infernal Cakewalk - George Méliès and a bunch of demonic girls dancing, in hell.  The short the proves that not only does the Devil have all the best tunes, he's a slick dancer as well.  Some great special effects, including Satan's Detachable Limbs and some flying fireballs.  I like to think this is what John Lithgow was imagining when he banned dancing in his town.

4. Jupiter's Thunderballs - A hilarious Méliès take on the Greek/Roman gods, with Jupiter using a fancy thunderbolt wand to create some Muses, dance with the pretty girls, turn the thunderbolts into an umbrella, turn the girls into statues, then blow everyone up, along with himself.  Literally fantastic, with the best title of the year.

5. The Life of an American Fireman - The title pretty much says it all.  Edwin Porter shows the life of firemen, from resting at the station (thinking of home in a comic strip-inspired thought balloon) to sliding down a pole and fighting a fire.  The most interesting thing here as that Porter hadn't quite settled on the kind of continuity editing  that we still use today, and that he utilizes in The Great Train Robbery).  Instead, he shows the entirety of the action from inside the burning apartment, then cuts back in time, where we see the same action from the street outside the building.  It wouldn't take long for Porter to abandon this experiment in favor of intercutting between scenes along a consistent timeline, using editing to move through space rather than time, but this experiment is an interesting dead-end.

6. What Happened in the Tunnel - A cute little joke film from Edwin Porter for the Edison company.  Nothing special, only a little racist, I guess.

The Laurel & Hardy Project #2: Along Came Auntie

The second film in the set again features only Oliver Hardy, though Stan Laurel is credited as a writer.  The film stars Glenn Tryon, who'd I'd never heard of but who managed to have a long, if undistinguished career in Hollywood as an actor, writer, director and producer.  Vivian Oakland plays a divorced woman who takes her first husband (Hardy) in as a border to raise some extra money.  When her wealthy aunt, who doesn't know about Oakland's divorce, and is strongly opposed to divorce on principle, comes to visit, Oakland and Hardy must pretend to be married (with her second husband (Tryon) posing as the border) in order to not jeopardize her inheritance.  Slapstick ensues, with much foolishness and each of the male leads dressing up as each other and Oakland at various times.  Hardy himself is a blast, at his best as a violently energetic musician, but Tryon and Oakland are pretty bland and the film as a whole is pretty rote, despite the weird potential of its premise.

The Week in Rankings

A rundown of the films I've seen recently along with their yearly rankings on The Big List:

City Streets - 10, 1931

They Died With Their Boots On - 16, 1941

The Constant Nymph - 12, 1943

So Long at the Fair - 14, 1950

Young Bess - 17, 1953

Nostalgia for the Light - 23, 2010

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil - 39, 2010

The Adjustment Bureau - 2011
Attack the Block - 2011

Captain America - 2011

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - 2011

Thor - 2011

The Artist - 2011

War Horse - 2011