A couple of hours ago I was discussing the Oscar nominations and wins that went to William Wyler's Ben-Hur ('59). This led me to a Charlie Rose riff that I posted on 8.17.16:
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The 2022-23 Oscar season will come to a merciful end six days hence -- Sunday, March 12. The ABC telecast will start around 5:30 pm Pacific. (Or is it 6 pm? -- I can never remember.) 3:30 or 4 pm if you count arrivals. And after it's over, nobody will ever have to think about Everything Everywhere All At Once ever again, much less watch the fecking thing.
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For the last eight years Gone With The Wind, one of the most financially successful Hollywood epics of all time as well as a moving parable about survival in hard times, has been on the liberal shit list -- officially shunned, regretted and derided by film festivals, the Academy's Apology Museum, HBO Max, etc. All to placate the African-American community and their justified resentment of the film's antiquated racial attitudes.
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We all understand that first-class Blurays of 1950s big-studio features that were captured on large-format celluloid (VistaVision, Cameras 65, Technirama, Super Panavision, etc.) are glorious eye candy.
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To me a perfect film understands itself perfectly, embraces the virtues of self-discipline and doesn’t mess around.
It tells the truth (or at least its own truth), throws nothing but strikes, allows no opposing hits and leaves no dangling threads.
It’s always a step or two ahead of the average audience, but not too far ahead. It’s smart and perceptive, and yet it never bores even the dumbest audience member, and it understands pacing and story tension and how to deal the right cards in the right way, and at the right time.
It knows, in short, what beginnings, middles and ends are supposed to achieve, and it follows through like a pro. It presents a spherical, recognizable world that adds up no matter how you slice it.
In his new book “Cinema Speculation“, Quentin Tarantino lists seven 20th Century films that he regards as perfect:
I’m not disagreeing with Quentin’s choices exactly. I certainly agree with five of them, but if I was forced to select my own seven perfectos I definitely wouldn’t include Hi-Ho Steverino‘s Jaws (a very satisfying and finely crafted summer popcorn film but saddled with a few problems) and I certainly wouldn’t choose Tobe Hooper‘s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…please.
Here are more perfect or near-perfect films…50 of them….the top third from “HE’s 160 Greatest Films of All Time” (posted on 7.24.15). I believe with all my heart that these 50 are just as perfectly assembled as Quentin’s seven. There’s no way to make a convincing case that Quentin’s seven are more perfect than any of HE’s 50, whatever that could possibly mean. Everything is arbitrary, personal…there’s no formula.
HE’s Top Ten Greatest American Films: (1) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, (2) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, (3 & 4) The Godfather & The Godfather, Part II (5) The Graduate, (6) Election, (7) Zodiac, (8) Rushmore, (9) Pulp Fiction, (10) Some Like It Hot.
Greatest American Films (11 to 20): (11) North By Northwest, (12) Notorious, (13) On The Waterfront, (14) Groundhog Day, (15) Goodfellas, (16) Out Of The Past, (17) Paths of Glory, (18) Psycho, (19) Raging Bull, (20) 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Greatest American Films (21 to 30): (21) Annie Hall, (22) Apocalypse Now, (23) Strangers on a Train, (24) East of Eden, (25) Bringing Up Baby, (26) The African Queen, (27) All About Eve, (28) The Wizard of Oz, (29) Zero Dark Thirty, (30) Only Angels Have Wings.
Greatest American Films (31 to 40): (31) Repo Man, (32) Heat, (33) Red River, (34) Drums Along the Mohawk, (35) Gone With The Wind, (36) Rebel Without a Cause, (37) Ben-Hur (38) The Best Years of Our Lives, (39) The Big Sleep, (40) Shane.
Greatest American Films (41 to 50): (41) Rear Window, (42) Bonnie And Clyde, (43) The Bridge On The River Kwai, (44) Casablanca, (45) Chinatown, (46) Citizen Kane (47) One-Eyed Jacks, (48) King Kong, (49) 12 Angry Men (50) The Informer.
Paramount has decided to open Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon wide on 12.23…terrific. Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “Sources close to Babylon suggest the earlier release date points to the studio’s confidence in the film”…maybe.
Paramount could also be figuring it’s safer to sell the big, broad elements than depend on early-break word of mouth. Who knows?
What are the main elements? An epic-sized capturing of a wild, crazy time. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in the ’20s. A splashy old-time Hollywood epic about change and convulsion. Orgies, elephants, cocaine and all manner of perversity.
Martin Scorsese will hate me for this, but HE is asking for predictions about how well Babylon will do with Joe and Jane Popcorn. Film mavens will eat it up, of course, and even from this distance it seems assured of several Oscar noms (including Best Picture). But how will Millennials and Zoomers respond?
It doesn’t look like streaming fare — it almost looks like something out of the Ben-Hur factory…call it Ben-Twisted…emphatic, ambitious, large-scale, orgiastic..something you really need to see on a big-ass screen..
From a certain angle it seems like a descendant of John Schlesinger‘s The Day of Locust (’75). Not the same kind of package as Babylon (a darker one actually), but vaguely similar in certain big-scale, crowd-scene respects, and it certainly seemed lavishly produced when it came out. Production costs were around $5 million, or $27.5 million in 2022 dollars.
Babylon cost $78 million.
Originally posted on 7.13.16: One thing you'll never see explored or even mentioned in any historical film is the level of hygiene available to the main characters. I realize that nobody wants to hear this stuff, but can I at least write one short article about it? We're all so accustomed to living in total hygienic splendor (huge bathrooms, dynamic showers, exotic soaps, dandified deodorants, perfumes, facial cremes, hair gels) that we tend to forget or ignore how unclean and smelly things were in the old days, especially before the 19th Century.
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“The big winner, nomination-wise, was The Power of the Dog…12 nominations, one for every person who saw it. Lady Gaga was a surprise, not being nominated, but the biggest snub in my opinion…I’m actually even angry about this, I’m kind of embarassed to say…[the biggest snub was] the unforgivable omission of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
“How did that not get one of the ten nominations? There were only 11 [half-decent] movies made this year. Forget the fact that [Spider-Man] made $750 million [domestic] and it still going. This was a great movie, and there were three Spider-Men in it! One of them was Andrew Garfield, and he was a Best Actor nominee.
“You’re telling me Don’t Look Up was better than Spider-Man? It most certainly was not.
“When did we decide that a Best Picture [nominee] always has to be serious? This was not the point when they started making films. Ben-Hur…chariots of leprosy. Frankenstein…a monster powered by lightning. Fantasia…Mickey Mouse on an acid trip. The Wizard of Oz…flying monkeys and a witch. These are great, classic, Oscar-level movies. There’s northing wrong with serious movies, a lot of them are fantastic and deserving, but when did ‘serious’ become a prequisite for earning an Academy Award?”
From Richard Rushfield‘s latest Ankler post, “Behold, The Incredible Shrinking Oscars…Again“:
“So the Academy exists to ratify the esoteric choices of guilds and 400 critics groups; critics who themselves are largely now unread, except by each other. But of course, it was impossible to hold the theatrical category to any viewership standards once the floodgates opened to the streamers, which are a black hole of information from which only glimpses of light emerge. And instead of taking public reaction into account, it’s just thrown out the window, and Oscar can become…another critics’ film circle?
“Which, if you’re looking at it from a perspective of honoring craftsmanship in cinema, is wonderful.
“If you’re looking at it from a perspective of maintaining a mass medium’s connection with a mass audience, then well, what would you say is the level of public excitement for one’s local critics’ circle announcements? Have you sensed an unfulfilled public demand for more of those?
“As one friend put it, ‘For years the promotion of movies and moviegoing was the collaboration of studios and the press. That’s over. The press has taken up streamers and indies to ‘save’ indies [the Eric Kohn / David Ehrlich aesthetic] and studios have all but said fuck it.’
“So in the Best Pic category, we have a cluster of films that were…flops, disappointments, underperforms, at best given a Gentleman’s C for COVID. And then a bunch of films whose audiences are total mysteries.
“To put it another way, is there any evidence that there is a single person under 40 on the planet who has watched a single one of these movies?”
...for a film that's reasonably decent and excitingly composed and a nice atmospheric New Orleans spooker, but which feels at times a teeny bit too lurid and sexualized for comfort, to the point of almost feeling like an exploitation film....almost.
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Yvette Mimieux has left the earth. Due respect for an actress who broke through in the early ’60s (The Time Machine, The Light in the Piazza, Toys in the Attic) and who went for broke and gave it hell when she starred in Jackson County Jail (’76), a somewhat schlocky but tough Roger Corman film that mostly holds up by present standards. (I happened to re-watch it only two weeks ago.) Hugs and condolences for friends, fans, colleagues, family.
It’s time to rectify the 1959 Oscars once and for all. Better late than never. The winners of record will still retain their places in history, of course, but 61 years have passed, new perspectives have emerged, and it’s time to ratify the new deal. But without being too rigid-minded.
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Charlton Heston passed on 4.5.08 at age 84. The poor guy had been grappling with Alzheimer’s Disease for the previous six years or so. In such a condition, departure for realms beyond isn’t the worst option. I posted the following when I heard the news:
(1) I saw Heston speak at a black-tie dinner at the Beverly Wilshire maybe nine or ten years ago. He didn’t carry a cane but he could barely walk — just shuffling along. I considered him a kind of enemy at that point because of his support of the NRA but my heart went out when I saw what lousy shape his legs were in. That brawny muscular guy in the loincloth who played oar-rower #41 in Ben-Hur had become a frail old coot in a toupee. What a rotten thing it is to suffer the infirmities of age.
(2) His best screen moment happened in the last act of The Big Country, when his ranch-hand character in The Big Country decides to abandon a short-lived ethical mutiny against his ruthless employer, played by Charles Bickford, and follow him into Blanco Canyon and an almost-certain gun battle to the death. When the rest of the hands who had briefly sided with Heston catch up and join them, Heston looks at Bickford with utter revulsion, in part because he knows he can’t defeat him but also because he knows that he’s emotionally trapped.
(3) The best story Heston ever told was when Ben-Hur director William Wyler spoke to him in his dressing room after the first or second day of shooting and said, “Chuck, I’ve thought about your performance over the last couple of days and you’re going to have to be better.” Sure, Willie, said Heston — just tell me what you want, what to do. “I can’t say exactly because I don’t know,” said Wyler. “I just know you have to be better.” And then Wyler said “see ya” and left the room. Heston said something about pouring himself one or two stiff ones and taking a long walk.
(4) Heston should have shown more humanity about gun laws in the wake of the Colombine shootings. He and the NRA should have thought more carefully about gun users being tested for a license, and about the proliferation of automatic weapons. If there was such a thing as answering for your sins at the gates of paradise, right about now St. Peter would definitely be asking Heston to join him on a nearby park bench and explain the gun thing.
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