This morning Indiewire‘s Matt Singerposted responses to the latest Criticwire question: “Name the best film of the last 25 years.” Variety‘s Scott Foundas selected There Will Be Blood. The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell chose In The Mood For Love. And Edwin Arnaudin of Ashvegas chose The Royal Tennenbaums…c’mon!
Choosing the best film of the last quarter century (or anything released since April 1988) is one of those dopey questions. Ridiculous, really. If I had to choose under threat of death I’d probably pick Election or Zodiac or Rushmore. But there’s no perfect answer that you wouldn’t want to change an hour or a day or a week later. Every other time I mention what I do to a stranger at a party they’ll say “what’s your favorite all-time film?” and I’ll always answer the same way: “I can’t think that way. Okay, Dr. Strangelove but it’s….I just don’t like doing this. There’s no single film that sits on top of the mountain.”
I’m willing to list the best 25 films of the last quarter-century and stick to it. That I can do. Actually I’ve just put the list together and it has to be at least 30.
Hollywood Elsewhere’s Top 30 Films Since April 1988: Election, Zodiac, Rushmore, Goodfellas, Groundhog Day, Heat, The Big Lebowski, The Social Network, Children of Men, A Serious Man, There Will Be Blood, The Insider, Memento, Fargo, Traffic, Che, Pulp Fiction, Zero Dark Thirty, Schindler’s List, Moneyball, Being John Malkovich, Silver Linings Playbook, United 93, The Limey, Volver, Se7en, Amour. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Fight Club, The Lives of Others.
HE’s Best Film of the last 25 Years (although I hate doing this): Election.
I learned yesterday that one of the hottest movies playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival is being research-screened in Pasadena this week. I won’t name the film, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to crash the screening because I don’t sneak around or play games. But even if the producers invited me I wouldn’t go because the you need to see ambitious films with the sharpest people. Movies are like plays — they play better in front of a “good house.”
Phillip Noyce‘s Mary and Martha is debuting so quietly on HBO that it can’t be called a debut — it’s a peek-out. It turned up last night on HBO without a shred of promotion or hoopla, or at least none that I’ve noticed. It’s an issue-driven film (based on a script by Notting Hill and Love Actually‘s Richard Curtis) about the ravages of malaria, and particularly about two moms (Hilary Swank and Brenda Blethyn) coping with the malaria-caused deaths of their sons in Africa, and about the social and political activism these tragedies bring about.
Right away you’re saying to yourself, “Okay, here we go…a tearjerker that’s going to tell me what a terrible thing it is to lose a child to malaria.” But it’s deeper and sadder and to a certain extent more all-encompassing than that, and so well acted by not only Swank and Blethyn but every last costar and bit player (Frank Grillo, James Woods, Lux Honey-Jardine, Sam Claflin, Sean O’Bryan, Ian Redford) and written with such clarity and finesse that it moves along and just sinks right in without a hint of huffing or puffing…it just happens.
Mary and Martha is clean and direct and earnest as far as the story allows it to go, which is farther than you might expect.
I watched a screener a week or two ago but then I saw it again on HBO last night, and it hit me all over again (and in a sense a bit more this time) how well made it is, how carefully finessed, how exactly right it all feels. Noyce is primarily known for directing big expensive action thrillers and potboilers (Salt, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, Dead Calm) as well as somewhat smaller-scaled humanistic dramas (Rabbit-Proof Fence, Catch A Fire, The Quiet American) — this is obviously one of the latter. The material might be a little on-the-nose, but Noyce knows exactly what he’s doing, and there’s just this sense of convergence — a team of clearly talented people have been told to contribute in just the right way.
Is Curtis’s story affecting? Without question. Does the story deliver surprising jolts and turns? Not really. It’s fair to call it somewhat predictable. It’s an instructional drama that doesn’t contain or strike what you’d call a universal chord, except for the element of working through grief. It’s obvious that we’re being set up to feel hurt during the first third of the film as we meet the two sons (Honey-Jardine, Claflin) and wait for the awfulness. But once Swank and Blethyn are on their own, more or less, the film quietly gathers strength. There’s no big knockout punch, but the finale feels whole and reasonably complete.
I could recite the story beat for beat and comment about this and that, but I’m going to let it go at this point.
Not all of the films shown at the annual TCM Classic Film Festival (4.25 to 4.28) have been recently restored and released on Bluray (or are due for a Bluray release down the road). But a great many are, and so I naturally wondered if the Saturday, 4.27 screening of John Frankenheimer‘s The Train indicated a possible Bluray release…I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope.
In an email received this morning, TCM programmer Genevieve McGillicuddy told me “no” on both counts. The Train (which is being screened in 35 mm) was chosen for three reasons, she informed. (1) “It’s a terrific, underappreciated movie,” (2) “It also fits in very well with our ‘Cinematic Journeys’ theme this year” and (3) “This year is also the 100th anniversary of Burt Lancaster‘s birth.”
So to summarize, one of the smartest and most beautifully shot and paced older action films ever made (and the last major-studio action film shot in black-and-white) is crying out for a Bluray release, and the World War II history behind The Train is about to enter the conversation in a few months’ time…and the TCM Classic Film Festival’s principal reasons for showing The Train, apart from the quality consideration, have to do with (a) tributing movies that offer intriguing travel destinations and (b) blowing out birthday candles.
Tai Chi is a martial art form, but it’s not primarily about ass-kicking. It’s a highly disciplined spiritual rite or practice that’s about seeking, nurturing and serenity. Obviously this trailer for Keanu Reeves‘ Man of Tai Chi is about trying to deliver more Neo thrills. The cries and whoofs as feet and hands go thudding into bodies…later.
I’m finally seeing Michael Bay‘s Pain & Gain (Paramount, 4.26) on Monday night. Pain is Bay’s first modestly-scaled (costing a relatively frugal $26 million), character-driven film ever — a “gimmee” that ansty Paramount execs let him do because he’s made them so much money with the Transformers films. Half of me wants to like Pain & Gain going in because it seems to signify that Bay is at least trying to deliver a little more nutritional value. On some level he’s also trying to atone for his sins.
In today’s Miami Herald, in fact, Bay has literally apologized to critic Rene Rodriguez for the frame-fucked, machine-gun cutting of Armageddon. Rodriguez wrote the interview after speaking to Bay during a recent Miami Beach press junket.
“I will apologize for Armageddon,” says Bay, “because we had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked ‘What do you do when you’re doing all the effects yourself?’ But the movie did fine.”
Rodriguez notes that Pain & Gain is “atypical” for the hyperkinetically-inclined Bay in that he “actually holds on shots and characters faces for longer than two seconds, giving you time to take them in.”
“People have always given me a hard time on my editing,” Bay admits. “But if if you could do a graph on my movies you would see how my editing has slowed down over the years. Bad Boys was my first movie, and we cut that quite fast. Back then it was very new for action. Now you see a lot of that imitated. Call it what you will. Yes, critics have given me shit about it. But when you watch the Bourne Identity movies, they are cut way faster.”
Bay is mainly referring, I think, is the second Bourne film (or the first one that Paul Greengrass directed)– the cutting in that one was absurd. When I first saw it at the WGA theatre a woman threw up.
Four years ago I wrote a piece called “Bay of Lost Hope.” It opens as follows:
“There was a movie-theatre moment eight years ago when I thought Michael Bay might one day grow into a semi-mature film artist. Maybe. To my delight and surprise the opening seconds of Pearl Harbor began with Hans Zimmer‘s music playing for nine beautiful seconds over a black screen — a semi-overture, I thought at first. But the black gave way to a shot of World War I-era biplanes cruising over cornfields during magic hour — a middle-American nostalgia scene. But that black-screen opener was still…well, mildly impressive.
“I asked Bay about the blackness at a press conference the next day. He talked about how he had to fight hard to begin the film this way, especially since it meant not starting this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film with the traditional highway-tree-lightning Bruckheimer logo.
“It wasn’t much of an artistic call on Bay’s part but it was at least something, I felt. I came away from Pearl Harbor half-convinced that if Bay ever wanted wanted to move beyond shallow whambam blockbuster movies that he had the potential to do so.”
I was inspired to write this after reading Kim Morgan‘s recent review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. She also suspects that Bay has more in his quiver than he’s commonly given credit for.”
Exhibitors at Cinemacon were down on Pain & Gain and maybe there are reasons for that. I’ll figure it out soon enough.
“If you watch Pain & Gain with an open mind,” Rodriguez comments, “you will see Bay is stretching, regardless of whether you like the movie.
“Of course, he’s making Transformers 4 next, so we’ll be back to the same-old. But I really liked the vibe of P & G. It is so Miami (which I know means nothing to people who don’t live here, but still). And they stayed true to the real story, with only a few exceptions. It’s an unpleasant, pitch-black comedy but it fucking works…as long as the viewer isn’t all PC-sensitive.”
When I first saw Thom Andersen‘s L.A. Plays Itself at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival (or was it 2005?), I decided that one day I’d see this fascinating cultural-geographical movie-fantasia again with a hip L.A. audience. Here it is six or seven years later with Andersen’s doc playing the American Cinematheque tonight. I have to go. The big screen makes all the difference.
From five or six years ago: “Daniel Plainview (a.k.a., Matthew Wilder) has criticized documentarian Thom Andersen as an ‘inexplicably revered megasnob.’ He also raps him for having said that Point Blank “was liked only by people who hate L.A.” Wilder is alluding to a quote from Andersen’s L.A. Plays Itself, but that’s not the phrasing. The exact line is ‘people who hate L.A. love Point Blank.'”
Reactions? A fairly cool concept but no girlie action unless…well, I guess Ryan Reynolds could conceivably find himself a dead girlfriend. A little too Men in Black-y? Bridges overdoing the shitkicker accent?
Like almost all Bluray critic-columnists, DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze likes or respects almost everything he sees, and if he’s less enthused about this or that Bluray he’ll always phrase his concerns with the utmost tact and delicacy. He wants those freebies to keep arriving in his mailbox. On top of which Tooze is a notorious grain-worshipper. He actually gets off on that covered-in-digital-mosquitoes effect. The swarmier, the better.
All to say that Toooze’s rave review of the new Champion Bluray (Olive Films, 4.23) has to be taken with a grain of salt.
“What a huge improvement!,” Tooze declares. “Everything is superior about the new Olive Films 1080P transfer. It shows textured grain, there is a lot more information in the frame, contrast is significantly more layered and [the] detail naturally rises, [and] quite dramatically. My words are less-impacting than simply looking at the screen captures below. The sound is lossless mono and also improved — notable in Dimitri Tiomkin‘s powerful score. As typical with Olive, there are no extras. We still give this Blu-ray a BIG thumbs up!!”
I was reminded during the Shane aspect-ratio brouhaha that the Bluray websites are mostly if not entirely about servicing Bluray distributors and averting their eyes from controversy at all costs. (Home Theatre Forum and Bluray.com are the occasional exceptions-to-the-rule.) The Shane thing was a fairly major story, but if you had been only reading DVD Beaver, Digital Bits, High-Def Digest and DVD Talk you wouldn’t have known it was even happening. The people who run these sites are avid Movie Catholics but they have next to no balls when it’s time to man up. They’re basically in business to get along.
I’m looking for a PDF of a ’70s National Lampoon article about the dumb, vulgar and unfunny dirty jokes that kids share when they’re nine or ten or eleven. You can find this crap all over the net but the NatLamp piece re-told these jokes with just the right tone. You know the kind of material I mean. A mother standing on the front stoop and calling for her son to come home — “Johnny Fuckerfaster! Johnny Fuckerfaster!” And one I remember from when I was eight: Q: “What did the kitchen cupboard say to the toilet?” A: “I’ve seen more cans than you have.” The worse, the better.
There are few things more numbing than reports about the latest blockbuster (in this instance Oblivion) earning serious coin on its opening weekend. Oblivion is a bothersome but moderately decent time-killer with a fine performance from Tom Cruise, and (as I said earlier) is less annoying than Prometheus. But reporting that X millions of Eloi heard the sirens and were persuaded to walk into the Morlock caves and fork over whatever amounts of money…it doesn’t matter.
Okay, it matters to those who are profiting — director-writer Joseph Kosinki, Cruise, the producers, Universal Studios, exhibitors, popcorn industry. But what’s in it for me? I wasn’t in pain when I saw it, and now I’ve already begun to forget it. I won’t buy the Bluray, I can tell you that.
What matters, as always, is what happen attendance-wise during the coming week and especially next weekend, but that’s my standard Saturday mantra.
“How odd that our shiniest celebrity, the man whose image once flashed most easily into our heads when we thought of the words ‘movie star,’ a man who, throughout his career, has grappled with all sorts of questions of privacy and secrecy and image control and damage control, has somehow emerged at this late date as the movie world’s most unlikely symbol of old-fashioned authenticity.”
A 4.19.13 quote from George Stevens, Jr. has been posted on Bob Furmanek’s 3D Film Archive site. It’s part of an intro to a definitive Shane aspect-ratio piece that will be posted soon. Here it is: “Dad’s definite preference was to have his films screened the way he shot them and framed them. He simply accepted the tradeoff to have a bigger screen in the competitive release climate in 1953.”
And yet on 3.15 Stevens, Jr. wrote me the following in an email about the forthcoming Shane Bluray, which Stevens Jr. had helped prepare: “Given the choice of having a 1:37 version placed in the center of a horizontal television screen with bars on each side, or a carefully configured 1:66 to 1 version that filled the screen, I am confident George Stevens would subscribe to the latter.”
