tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65180115370051816162024-03-13T19:11:34.256-07:00Flickdom DictumFlickdom Dictumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10185985484675274116noreply@blogger.comBlogger106125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-22875906012852699132017-02-24T15:23:00.002-07:002017-02-24T15:50:59.396-07:00Bizarro Oscars: 89th Academy Awards – Dream Ballot<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I have seen 120 of the 336 films the Academy deems eligible for the big prize this year. That’s about a 4% increase on last year, despite seeing fewer total 2016 movies than I had seen 2015 movies the year before. Take from that what you will.<br />
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The Bizarro Oscars is my alt-awards where I play by Academy-rules eligibility to select my ideal nominations and winners.<br />
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The Academy definitely overcompensated this year in full-tilt diversity nominees and, while it would be easy to call it disingenuous for taking the bait on pictures like <i>Hidden Figures</i> and<i> Fences</i>, it’s no worse than the less-diverse bait they take any other year (except for maybe <i>Lion</i> aka <i>Google Maps: The Movie</i>). The fact of the matter remains: there are not a lot of lead roles being offered to non-white men. <i>Moonlight</i> is far from my favorite film of the year (sitting, currently, at #45), but it is my favorite Oscar-eligible narrative film starring a non-white male. I’ve said it before: the Oscars can only do so much, though it should be noted that, it seems they are at least trying.<br />
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What follows is nothing nearing predictions, only an alternative universe where everything is perfect.<br />
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<b><u>ACTOR –in a Leading Role</u></b><br />
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I’ve been on the Casey Affleck bandwagon since <i>Gerry</i> and, while not all of Lonergan’s film resonated with me as I would have hoped, <i>Manchester by the Sea</i>’s nuanced performances can’t be denied. This category gives something of the Heath Ledger treatment to Yelchin and insists the LaBeouf nod is irony-free.<br />
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<b>Casey Affleck – <i>Manchester by the Sea</i></b></div>
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Adam Driver – <i>Paterson</i></div>
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Anton Yelchin – <i>Green Room</i></div>
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Christian Bale – <i>Knight of Cups</i></div>
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Shia LaBeouf – <i>American Honey</i></div>
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<b><u>ACTRESS –in a Leading Role</u></b><br />
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It was real easy for me to call shenanigans at the Oscar website replacing Amy Adams’s accidental nomination with Ruth Negga in hopes that #OscarsNotSoWhite2017 on the day nominations were announced. That is until I was left trying to trim my list from six and Adams lost out again. <br />
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The Academy made is somewhat easier for me as Margherita Buy is ineligible for <i>Mia Madre</i>. So is Lauren Ashley Carter for <i>Darling</i>, Sonia Braga for <i>Aquarius</i>, and Ruth Wilson for <i>I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House</i>. <br />
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Some may find the real surprise here being Isabelle Huppert getting a lead nod and a supporting nod, neither of which for <i>Elle</i>. C’est la vie. <br />
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<b>Natalie Portman –<i> Jackie</i></b></div>
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Hailee Steinfeld – <i>The Edge of Seventeen</i></div>
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Royalty Hightower – <i>The Fits</i></div>
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Rebecca Hall – <i>Christine</i></div>
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Isabelle Huppert – <i>Things to Come</i></div>
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<b><u>ACTOR –in a Supporting Role</u></b><br />
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The narrative structure of <i>Moonlight</i> leaves these awards with no good way to deal with its fine performances. There is no “lead,” but Sanders’s exceptional work hardly seems appropriate for the “supporting” category. I normally despise the political vote, but awarding Sanders here not only satisfies awarding a deserving movie, but rewards an excellent performance in the only way the rules might allow. With apologies to true supporting stars (Hayden Szeto in particular), I’m going against my normal tendency this year.<br />
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<b>Ashton Sanders – <i>Moonlight</i></b></div>
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Mahershala Ali – <i>Moonlight</i></div>
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Billy Crudup – <i>20th Century Women</i></div>
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John Goodman – <i>10 Cloverfield Lane</i></div>
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John Travolta – <i>In a Valley of Violence</i></div>
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<b><u>ACTRESS –in a Supporting Role</u></b><br />
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I have never considered myself a Natalie Portman fan yet, here I am in 2017 nominating her in both lead and supporting categories. Huh.<br />
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She was helped by Déborah Lukumuena being ineligible for <i>Divines</i>.<br />
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The real shame is I couldn’t find room to acknowledge Kristen Stewart or Greta Gerwig’s banner years. Hopefully <i>Personal Shopper </i>will be Oscar-eligible next year and it will be everything I hope it is.<br />
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<b>Lily Gladstone – <i>Certain Women</i></b></div>
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Michelle Williams – <i>Manchester by the Sea</i></div>
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Isabelle Huppert – <i>Louder than Bombs</i></div>
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Laura Dern – <i>Certain Women</i></div>
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Natalie Portman – <i>Knight of Cups</i></div>
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<b><u>ANIMATED FEATURE FILM</u></b><br />
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<i>The Red Turtle</i> reads like a gospel parable that is more deeply rewarding the less you try to anticipate its message. It’s a strong year when Pixar gets bumped from the top five.<br />
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<b><i>The Red Turtle</i></b></div>
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<i>Your Name</i></div>
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<i>Kubo and the Two Strings</i></div>
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<i>April and the Extraordinary World</i></div>
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<i>Zootopia</i></div>
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<b><u>CINEMATOGRAPHY</u></b><br />
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And while we’re at it, let’s give Emmanuel Lubezki next year’s cinematography award for <i>Song to Song</i>, too.<br />
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<i><b>Knight of Cups</b></i></div>
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<i>Green Room</i></div>
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<i>Jackie</i></div>
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<i>The Witch</i></div>
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<i>The Love Witch</i></div>
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<b><u>COSTUME DESIGN</u></b><br />
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<i>Beyonce: Lemonade</i> is ineligible, so who really cares? <br />
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<b><i>Jackie</i></b></div>
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<i>The Neon Demon</i></div>
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<i>Christine</i></div>
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<i>Sunset Song</i></div>
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<i>Love & Friendship</i></div>
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<b><u>DIRECTING</u></b><br />
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Going up against Terrence Malick is always a tall order in my book. And what we’re met with this year is a Jim Jarmusch picture that doesn’t blow me away in terms of cinematography or production design. Yet, the picture is so fully-realized that, by act three, I had completely fallen into its universe. <br />
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I viewed <i>Paterson</i> on a Monday evening and, by the time its central character reached his Friday, I was making plans for the creative work I was about to do that weekend. I was taken aback when I realized that it was still only Monday. This rare spatial immersion is a product of Jarmusch’s rhythms and auteur sensibility. <br />
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<b><i>Paterson</i></b></div>
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<i>Knight of Cups</i></div>
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<i>20th Century Women</i></div>
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<i>Green Room</i></div>
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<i>Louder than Bombs</i></div>
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<b><u>DOCUMENTARY FEATURE</u></b><br />
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The number of outstanding documentaries that came out in 2016 which didn’t even make the Oscar shortlist is astounding. <br />
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<b><i>O.J.: Made in America</i></b></div>
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<i>Zero Days</i></div>
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<i>Cameraperson</i></div>
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<i>13th</i></div>
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<i>Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience</i></div>
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<b><u>FILM EDITING</u></b><br />
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By my count, <i>Woodstock</i> is the only documentary to ever receive a film editing nomination. That the eight-hour <i>O.J.: Made in America</i> is formed into a coherent (and politically relevant) thematic and historical expose is a miracle.<br />
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But is it poetry? Again, it’s hard to argue with Malick.<br />
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<b><i>Knight of Cups</i></b></div>
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<i>Green Room</i></div>
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<i>O.J.: Made in America</i></div>
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<i>Elle</i></div>
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<i>Arrival</i></div>
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<b><u>FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM</u></b><br />
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The Academy rules here are weird, and I don’t understand why each country should be limited to one potential nominee. And <u>Under the Shadow</u> being a U.K. submission seems almost a cheat. Rules are rules but I’ll always see many more foreign language films in a given year than the sample size shows in eligibility.<br />
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<b><i>Elle</i></b></div>
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<i>Under the Shadow</i></div>
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<i>Toni Erdmann</i></div>
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<i>Fire at Sea</i></div>
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<i>Julieta</i></div>
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<b><u>MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING</u></b><br />
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Here are three movies of whom I may be the only fan.<br />
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<b><i>The Neon Demon</i></b></div>
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<i>X-Men: Apocalypse</i></div>
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<i>The Legend of Tarzan</i></div>
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<b><u>MUSIC –Original Score</u></b><br />
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I’ve undertaken a role of film editor this year with a local production company. It’s a worthwhile, humbling and fulfilling creative endeavor, no matter how small. It has opened my eyes to things we’re trained to not see as film viewers and, often, success comes in the sublime. <br />
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Score, however, is something I’m still not good with. I rarely find film scores memorable and, furthermore, don’t particularly think they should be if they’re doing their job. Not that it isn’t an art, only one I don’t feel informed enough to opine on. The many Oscar voters do is strange to me.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Jackie</i></b></div>
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<i>Knight of Cups</i></div>
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<i>Arrival</i></div>
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<i>Rogue One</i></div>
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<i>Silence</i></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HOZt1i5_5DM" width="480"></iframe>
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<b><u>MUSIC –Original Song</u></b></div>
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It sucks that Common has had to become the guy to recite pedantic, accessible sermons to Ava DuVernay’s choir as the by-design broad appeal of his verses throws something of a fire blanket on the choleric edge of conscious hip-hop. “Letter to the Free” is important, well-crafted and affecting but is delivered with an Obama “when they go low, we go high” stoicism—now synonymous with defeat—that I just want to listen to Killer Mike’s “That’s Life” from ten years ago.<br />
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P.S., did Sia score the end credits to eight different films this year? Statistically, one had to end up here.<br />
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<b>“Loving” from <i>Loving</i></b></div>
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“Letter To The Free” from <i>13th</i></div>
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“The Ballad Of Wiener-Dog” from <i>Wiener-Dog</i></div>
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“Drive It Like You Stole It” from <i>Sing Street</i></div>
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“Waving Goodbye” from <i>The Neon Demon</i></div>
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<b><u>PRODUCTION DESIGN</u></b><br />
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It’s a shame I couldn’t find room for Hail, Caesar! here, leaving it completely snubbed this year. Sorry.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>20th Century Women</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Green Room</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Jackie</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Love Witch</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Neon Demon</i></div>
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<b><u>SOUND EDITING</u></b><br />
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Technical categories are a pretty crummy area for <i>Green Room</i> to win its only awards, but at least I get to spread the love around. <br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Green Room</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>10 Cloverfield Lane</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Arrival</i></div>
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<i>Rogue One</i></div>
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<i>X-Men: Apocalypse</i></div>
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<br />
<br />
<b><u>SOUND MIXING</u></b><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Green Room</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Arrival</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Nice Guys</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Blood Father</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Rogue One</i></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><u>VISUAL EFFECTS</u></b><br />
<br />
Don’t be fooled, <i>Rogue One</i> is more than just a pretty face. If cinema was nearly as dead this year as the memes wanted us to believe, this could have been a contender.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Rogue One</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>X-Men: Apocalypse</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Arrival</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Midnight Special</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Legend of Tarzan</i></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><u>WRITING –Adapted Screenplay</u></b><br />
<br />
Adapting Ted Chiang’s seemingly un-cinematic work to feature length is no small feat and, although the third act of <i>Arrival</i> came off a little cold and too on-the-nose for me, it still expounds on central themes in brave ways. I don’t see in Villeneuve the visionary for whom many have already lined up to carry his robe’s train, but <i>Arrival</i>—which is, at times, great—proves he is only as good as his writer. How does that sit with those waiting with bated breath for <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> from the writer of <i>Green Lantern</i>?<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Certain Women</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Elle</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Arrival</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Silence</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Blood Father</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<b><u>WRITING –Original Screenplay</u></b><br />
<br />
Jarmusch’s <i>Paterson</i> is nearly an adaptation just as his <i>Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai</i> is an adaptation of the <i>Hagakure</i> (or, for that matter, Malick’s <i>Knight of Cups </i>is an adaptation of <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>). It’s an adaptation so infused by its influences that it becomes an autonomous universe celebrating the sublimity and grace of mundanity. <br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Paterson</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Knight of Cups</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>20th Century Women</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Louder than Bombs</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Edge of Seventeen</i></div>
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<br />
<br />
<b><u>BEST PICTURE</u></b><br />
<br />
According to the culture, 2016 sure didn’t seem like much of a year to celebrate. I felt particularly low on April 21 when I followed the news of Prince’s death with a screening of <i>Green Room</i> only to find it unintentionally edifying when a punk names Prince his desert island artist. How quaint “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” seemed in April of last year, no? I don’t think many of us expected Nazi punks to become a nearly daily news occurrence as threat to American democracy by the new administration. <br />
<br />
And now even our NEA is endangered. If <i>Green Room</i> seemed brutal, I hate to forethink what brilliance the America’s horror grindhouse is going to churn out in four years’ time. The best films of the year are impressionistic poetry—some even about poetry—in an era in which the culture could use a mirror held up to itself. <br />
<br />
A lot of things may have died in 2016. Cinema isn’t one of them. <br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Paterson</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Knight of Cups</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>20th Century Women</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Green Room</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Louder than Bombs</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Edge of Seventeen</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Witch</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>O.J.: Made in America</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Jackie</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Fits</i></div>
</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-44162498760874489412016-10-31T15:27:00.000-07:002017-01-05T08:54:35.105-07:0031 Days of Horror (Octuber 2016)<b>Friday 30-Sep-16 at dusk</b><br />
Maniac Cop 2 (1990)<br />
Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1993)<br />
<span style="color: red;">So You Want to Be an Heir (1953)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Grab the Ghost (1920)</span><br />
Curtains (1983)<br />
<br />
<b>Saturday 1-Oct-16</b><br />
The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Shootin' Injuns (1925)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Gum Shoes (1935)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Big Shave (1968)</span><br />
The Rider of the Skulls (1965)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Au Secours! (1924)</span><br />
Popcorn (1991)<br />
<span style="color: red;">A Child's Play Story: Chucky's Revenge (2006)</span><br />
The Eyes of the Mummy (1918)<br />
Baghead (2008)<br />
Ghoulies II (1988)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case (1930)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Tuck Me In (2014)</span><br />
The Cat Creeps (1946)<br />
<br />
<b>Sunday 2-Oct-16</b><br />
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)<br />
Cat People (1982)<br />
The Golem (1920)<br />
Blue Sunshine (1978)<br />
Juan of the Dead (2011)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Monday 3-Oct-16</b><br />
Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)<br />
Revolt of the Zombies (1936)<br />
Wolfen (1981)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Ghosks Is the Bunk (1939)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> That's the Spirit (1933)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Trick or Treat (1952)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Fisheye (1980)<br /> To Boo or Not To Boo (1951)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Early 70's Horror Trailer (1999)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Recorded Live (1975)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Killing of an Egg (1977)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><br /></span>
<b>Tuesday 4-Oct-16</b><br />
Eerie Tales (1919)<br />
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)<br />
The Curses of the Witch (1927)<br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday 5-Oct-16</b><br />
Idle Hands (1999)<br />
Phantom of the 10,000 Leagues (1955)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Genesis (1998)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Enemy Bacteria (1945)</span><br />
Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1986)<br />
Furcht (1917)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Tales from the Far Side (1994)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Idle Roomers (1943)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Felix the Ghost Breaker (1923)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Transylvania 6-5000 (1963)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><br /></span>
<b>Thursday 6-Oct-16</b><br />
Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924)<br />
Dante's Inferno (1924)<br />
Cure (1997)<br />
<br />
<b>Friday 7-Oct-16</b><br />
Condemned to Live (1935)<br />
The Magician (1926)<br />
Identity (2003)<br />
Devil (2011)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Panic (1978)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Outer Space Jitters (1957)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Legend of the Seven Bloody Torturers (2007)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> "The Beatles": If I Fell (1965)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984)</span><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Saturday 8-Oct-16</b><br />
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957)<br />
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)<br />
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)<br />
Frankenstein's Bloody Terror (1968)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> Creeps (1956)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Crime on their Hands (1948)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> It Took Guts (1979)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> What Do You Think? (Number Three) (1938)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Son of Frankenstein (1960)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Chambre jaune (2002)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Dawn of an Evil Millennium (1988)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Jasper and the Haunted House (1942)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Black Mass (1928)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Tales of Frankenstein (1958)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Ursula (1961)</span><br />
Frankenstein (2015)<br />
[rec]2 (2009)<br />
Highway to Hell (1991)<br />
<br />
<b>Sunday 9-Oct-16</b><br />
Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980)<br />
The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962)<br />
Sh! The Octopus (1937)<br />
<br />
<b>Monday 10-Oct-16</b><br />
Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest (1925)<br />
Pig Hunt (2008)<br />
Beneath (2013)<br />
Storm Warning (2007)<br />
Kongo (1932)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Tuesday 11-Oct-16</b><br />
West of Zanzibar (1928)<br />
The Cuckoo Clock (1938)<br />
The Black Doll (1938)<br />
Night Tide (1961)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Wednesday 12-Oct-16</b><br />
Christine (1983)<br />
The Butcher (2006)<br />
The Last Warning (1929)<br />
House of Darkness (1948)<br />
The Black Room (1935)<br />
<br />
<b>Thursday 13-Oct-16</b><br />
The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)<br />
The Bat Whispers (1930)<br />
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Vampire (1952)<br />
Invasion of the Blood Farmers (1972)<br />
The Stone Rider (1923)<br />
<br />
<b>Friday 14-Oct-16</b><br />
Night of Terror (1933)<br />
Pulgasari (1985)<br />
Knucklebones (2016)<br />
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)<br />
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)<br />
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)<br />
Citadel (2012)<br />
<br />
<b>Saturday 15-Oct-16</b><br />
The Beast (1975)<br />
Trapped by the Mormons (1922)<br />
Werewolf Shadow (1971)<br />
Phase IV (1974)<br />
It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955)<br />
Calvaire (2004)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Abe (2013)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Cat With Hands (2001)</span><br />
<br />
<b>Sunday 16-Oct-16</b><br />
<span style="color: red;">The Catskill Chainsaw Redemption (2004)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water (1973)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Happy Hooligan in the Spider and the Fly (1918)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> A Christmas Treat (1985)</span><br />
Sombre (1998)<br />
Slaughter High (1986)<br />
The Mutilator (1984)<br />
The Woods (2006)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Belphegor: Chapter 1 (1927)</span><br />
"Stranger Things": Chapter 4 (2016)<br />
<br />
<b>Monday 17-Oct-16</b><br />
Chloe, Love Is Calling You (1934)<br />
Fright (1956)<br />
Bride of the Gorilla (1951)<br />
Eaten Alive (1976)<br />
"Stranger Things": Chapter 5 (2016)<br />
"Stranger Things": Chapter 6 (2016)<br />
"Stranger Thigns": Chapter 7 (2016)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Tuesday 18-Oct-16</b><br />
You'll Find Out (1940)<br />
Night Train Murders (1975)<br />
The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Woman Who Powders Herself (1972)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> We Together (2016)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Skeleton Frolics (1937)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Geometria (1987)</span><br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday 19-Oct-16</b><br />
Horror Island (1941)<br />
The Old Dark House (1963)<br />
Tischlein deck dich, Eselein strech dich, Knüppel aus dern Sack (1921)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Betty Boop's Museum (1932)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Mill at Calder's End (2015)</span><br />
"Stranger Things": Chapter 8 (2016)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Of Cash and Hash (1955)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Paris qui dort (1924)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span>
<b>Thursday 20-Oct-16</b><br />
I Married A Witch (1942)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Ghost Talks (1949)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Foxes (2011)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse (1947)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie (1986)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Attack of the Helping Hand (1981)</span><br />
Microwave Massacre (1983)<br />
Shin Godzilla (2016)<br />
Bloodlust! (1961)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> Lights Out (2013)</span><br />
Tales from the Far Side II (1997)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Claymation Comedy of Horrors Show (1991)</span><br />
Hilde Warren und der tod (1917)<br />
<br />
<b>Friday 21-Oct-16</b><br />
The Return of the Vampire (1943)<br />
31 (2016)<br />
<br />
<b>Saturday 22-Oct-16</b><br />
Baba Yaga (1973)<br />
Mesa of Lost Women (1953)<br />
Devil Girl From Mars (1954)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Drag (1993)</span><br />
<br />
<b>Sunday 23-Oct-16</b><br />
Street Trash (1987)<br />
Amsterdamned (1988)<br />
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)<br />
<br />
<b>Monday 24-Oct-16</b><br />
Parents (1989)<br />
Cry of the Werewolf (1944)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> "The Twilight Zone": The Howling Man (1960)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Mechanical Man (1921)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Spook Speaks (1940)</span><br />
The World of Kanako (2014)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Danse macabre (1922)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Shivering Spooks (1926)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Too Many Cooks (2014)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Chubby Killer (2009)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Coyote (2010)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Mad Genius (1931)</span><br />
Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College (1991)<br />
<br />
<b>Tuesday 25-Oct-16</b><br />
<span style="color: red;">Living With Jigsaw (2013)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Working With Jigsaw (2016)</span><br />
Night of the Comet (1984)<br />
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)<br />
The Vampire's Ghost (1945)<br />
The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Chicken from Outer Space (1996)</span><br />
Lust for a Vampire (1971)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Unedited Footage of a Bear (2014)</span><br />
Last Woman on Earth (1960)<br />
The Conjuring 2 (2016)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Fact in the Case of Mister Hollow (2008)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Narrative of Victor Karloch (2012)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Under the Car (1992)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Lightning Bryce: Bared Fangs (1919)</span><br />
Blood of a Poet (1932)<br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday 26-Oct-16</b><br />
Things Happen At Night (1947)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Fearless Vampire Killers: Vampires 101 (1967)</span><br />
In My Skin (2002)<br />
<span style="color: red;">"Ash vs. Evil Dead": Home (2016)</span><br />
The Gorilla (1939)<br />
<span style="color: red;">A Witch's Tangled Hare (1959)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Dummy (1982)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> To Heir Is Human (1944)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Bottles (1936)</span><br />
Something Weird (1967)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Murder in 3-D (1941)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Woton's Wake (1962)</span><br />
Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night (2010)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Pardon My Terror (1946)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Night of the Living Bread (1990)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> One Shivery Night (1950)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Le puits et le pendule (1964)</span><br />
El Superloco (1937)<br />
<br />
<b>Thursday 27-Oct-16</b><br />
The Rainbow Man (1949)<br />
The Hole (2001)<br />
Nightmare (1964)<br />
Ghoulies IV (1994)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Bloody Christmas (2003)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Elevated (1997)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> "Tales from the Crypt": This'll Kill Ya (1992)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Ghost Parade (1931)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Dr. Jerkyl's Hide (1954)</span><br />
Blood Rage (1987)<br />
<br />
<b>Friday 28-Oct-16</b><br />
The Flying Saucer (1950)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Haunted House (1929)</span><br />
February (2015)<br />
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Saw Rebirth (2005)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Thriller (1983)</span><br />
Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)<br />
Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010)<br />
South of Sanity (2012)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Saturday 29-Oct-16</b><br />
Sometimes They Come Back ...Again (1996)<br />
Hush (2016)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Live Ghost (1934)</span><br />
Santa's Slay (2005)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Lottery (1969)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span>
<b>Sunday 30-Oct-16</b><br />
Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)<br />
Rituals (1977)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Tell-Tale Heart (1971)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Bitch Is Back (1995)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Signalman (1976)</span><br />
Beyond the Darkness (1979)<br />
Mr. Vampire (1985)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Haunted Mouth (1974)</span><br />
<br />
<b>Monday 31-Oct-16</b><br />
Lord of Illusions (1995)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Contraption (1977)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Corridor (1989)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Un couple d'artistes (1970)</span><br />
Embodiment of Evil (2008)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Paques man (2000)</span><br />
Deafula (1975)<br />
The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (1976)Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-91836291995982807472016-03-15T15:39:00.000-07:002016-03-15T15:41:08.265-07:00Stan Laurel: Extended Mileage<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkJYz6fg_uygpEeFOtgxow9-tY59rnOEiGLMoLHrmWFLdPw7A5dhT1T6yKBPYXzTvI4HVLcCBRAubj9XxKWimsKjXP-57ZuznJmoU8ev-8mr0wiByzucg57oiK-rtK8VSxJxe8FOjHxvE/s1600/pest-dumb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkJYz6fg_uygpEeFOtgxow9-tY59rnOEiGLMoLHrmWFLdPw7A5dhT1T6yKBPYXzTvI4HVLcCBRAubj9XxKWimsKjXP-57ZuznJmoU8ev-8mr0wiByzucg57oiK-rtK8VSxJxe8FOjHxvE/s400/pest-dumb.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stan Laurel in <i>The Pest</i> (1922)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjToopsatfe1hAOYMw9Y1dvqiUhSuczWh0djYb-8lgeTbqSFMz7FGVS5469q7q0hAGtU1bZQVDAgp96jsF3G65lzn2d7sxK4FzmsHyAUHdtZK7EFbcPCf2P6Sq-kNFogZk5hzA_CjAYzKE/s1600/killorcuredumb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjToopsatfe1hAOYMw9Y1dvqiUhSuczWh0djYb-8lgeTbqSFMz7FGVS5469q7q0hAGtU1bZQVDAgp96jsF3G65lzn2d7sxK4FzmsHyAUHdtZK7EFbcPCf2P6Sq-kNFogZk5hzA_CjAYzKE/s400/killorcuredumb.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stan Laurel in <i>Kill or Cure</i> (1923)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgokR8q0yeGjkiqlICpgm5EXCAlr2YJyF6JnSTA9SeUybEuBnVmB6-fWNuIIbJn4khDlpSgwfB_GBSKOmrEhFAfytYmU5nVLa8jEd78Jr8j02qe_HY0tKb3jnNfOJQaboJZwT_ZCi2vk80/s1600/belowzero-dumb.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgokR8q0yeGjkiqlICpgm5EXCAlr2YJyF6JnSTA9SeUybEuBnVmB6-fWNuIIbJn4khDlpSgwfB_GBSKOmrEhFAfytYmU5nVLa8jEd78Jr8j02qe_HY0tKb3jnNfOJQaboJZwT_ZCi2vk80/s400/belowzero-dumb.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laurel & Hardy in <i>Below Zero</i> (1930)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-84566970548453303862016-02-27T17:15:00.001-07:002016-02-27T17:27:24.110-07:00Every Oscar Best Picture Ranked (Part 3 of 3)<div class="MsoNormal">
Now that all the technical awards have been handed out at
earlier ceremonies, we’ve reached the crescendo of this pomp and
circumstance. The top ten: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>10. <i>Unforgiven</i></b>
(1992)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Credit the success of <i>Unforgiven</i>
that, nearly 25 years on, it looks less revisionist by comparison. Not that it hasn’t been done better before
(Boetticher) or since (“Deadwood”), but I think where it looks tame today is
largely due to the now well-tread path it forged. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s hard to think that the Academy didn’t anticipate it was
Eastwood’s, as well as the traditional Western’s, dusk and—while I wouldn’t
trade <i>A Perfect World</i> or <i>Letters from Iwo Jima</i> for anything—I
could have largely done without the geriatric tour. I’m not refusing to take responsibility for
my cynicism that has come with age, but I think I would have preferred a
romantic end for The Man With No Name instead of a world where Clint makes the
empty-chair speech at the Republican National Convention. Unfair to the art, probably, but it can’t exist
in a vacuum either.</div>
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<b>9. <i>All Quiet on the
Western Front</i></b> (1930)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Academy has, historically, loved the war film while
trying to, historically, remain apolitical.
Put another way, war films are rarely about the complexity of war and
more about projecting social issues, the human spirit, or American guilty
conscience over a war backdrop. <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i> had a
great effect on me when I was 14 as I imagine it did many of the supposed 100
million viewers who saw it, worldwide, in the 1930s. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s sticky, and I like this aspect of it. Not its pacifistic message, mind you. That is crystal clear, but it’s the character
and nationalist representation that is interesting. War is harrowing, ugly, and crushes our
humanity. It is a waste, the film says,
but conveniently from the German point of view.
It’s remarkable America could sympathize with the film’s German
protagonists in 1930, but I wonder if it could have succeeded had its
protagonist been a slaughtered American.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM0c3L8epO0d0-GTetQ_NI9vzlc2JbokLRWO-r0FRaRtIyIDa1Ew9Jny4cMSO0UsfGh64ielPYYB97ti8kSrB5TBHa-Pj1ghyPdP2Uw41tXBdty63ulbawQSbvk0-0V7T1-PHouMSeshg/s1600/rocky-1976.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM0c3L8epO0d0-GTetQ_NI9vzlc2JbokLRWO-r0FRaRtIyIDa1Ew9Jny4cMSO0UsfGh64ielPYYB97ti8kSrB5TBHa-Pj1ghyPdP2Uw41tXBdty63ulbawQSbvk0-0V7T1-PHouMSeshg/s640/rocky-1976.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>8. <i>Rocky</i></b> (1976)<o:p></o:p></div>
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So sad for cynical New Hollywood idolaters that <i>Taxi Driver</i> lost out to the rare,
genuine, everyman auteur triumph of <i>Rocky</i>. If you really want to rankle ‘em, <i>Letters from Iwo Jima</i> should have beat <i>The Departed</i>, too.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>7. <i>It Happened One
Night</i> </b>(1934)<o:p></o:p></div>
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There are great movies and then there are movies that
revolutionize a genre, threaten to transform gender hierarchy in screen
representation, entrance a generation and still hold up 80 years later. The screwball comedy might be my favorite
classic genre, God bless Frank Capra.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSceuLzP6ilLo43cV_eqvQ5_yreOuTZzyfPXEVjQ5wS-IoGk0WOzRwv6a56XMPfxVuH5GDVNy-GJ1zJjSM_3AF3UAwYR7Ifa12vMNaqNQYzgdISruGLNWFxsGoaWw33FnRNUJScSm1k3I/s1600/on-the-waterfront-brando.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSceuLzP6ilLo43cV_eqvQ5_yreOuTZzyfPXEVjQ5wS-IoGk0WOzRwv6a56XMPfxVuH5GDVNy-GJ1zJjSM_3AF3UAwYR7Ifa12vMNaqNQYzgdISruGLNWFxsGoaWw33FnRNUJScSm1k3I/s640/on-the-waterfront-brando.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>6. <i>On the Waterfront</i></b>
(1954)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>On the Waterfront</i>
is my <i>Casablanca</i>. It’s a male-centric melodrama with a
bittersweet (but mostly positive) ending full of sharp, quotable dialogue and
iconic, star-driven acting. The
difference, for me, is that it also has a visual panache (<i>Casablanca</i> is rather flat) to earn its legendary status.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDj5eo8hDegTFvpAxhVKvKNa3PkWUSBrnkf6Dl5BA_DGDDoywpluOAhEMhavugrTXYwMSKYl21zlosKg9P1mF9e3AhK8dwBXAEE_cnK4oBubUy00Tt4mBaVr125APUPtIYdI6B7NvzRSE/s1600/sunrise-song-two-humans.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDj5eo8hDegTFvpAxhVKvKNa3PkWUSBrnkf6Dl5BA_DGDDoywpluOAhEMhavugrTXYwMSKYl21zlosKg9P1mF9e3AhK8dwBXAEE_cnK4oBubUy00Tt4mBaVr125APUPtIYdI6B7NvzRSE/s640/sunrise-song-two-humans.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>5. <i>Sunrise: A Song of
Two Humans</i></b> (1927)<o:p></o:p></div>
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F.W. Murnau, like his visual compatriot and Fox colleague
Frank Borzage, perfected visual language in a remarkably short time, elevating
film—this is no understatement—to the highest of arts, rich in the aesthetic,
the moral, the religious and the dramatic.
It’s like the Renaissance happening 15 years after the invention of oil
paints. Shakespeare emerging from shadow
puppetry. There’s no Hitchcock without
its Americanization of German Expressionism.
No Ford without its lyrical folkways. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>4. <i>Annie Hall</i></b>
(1977)<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s easy to underestimate how revolutionary <i>Annie Hall</i> is. For starters, the Woody Allen character we
know to this day was surely honed through Allen’s early comedies but modified
and unleashed specifically with this picture.
It’s a comedy in name only as “screwball” sounds a lot less funny from
the psychiatrist’s couch. It’s dark,
it’s unafraid to stoke the ugliness of human nature and feed it to a large
commercial audience. It wears its
influences on its sleeve—from the French New Wave to Ingmar Bergman to Walt
Disney—yet feels original in its rapid-fire delivery. It’s remarkable how much is thrown at the
wall here and even more remarkable that it sticks. <i>Annie Hall</i> is not my favorite Woody Allen,
but the time is overdue to reexamine how such seemingly light fare changed the
cinematic landscape. That it appears
effortless is its biggest ruse.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw6kzUzVDz27cIjKuW2lK6QSNQi_hxu4Qokc6GRrDVy_juXj1_0BUrPmwB3iD50LJUCPSU3PgadwGVZjI-UqG89pEMaAvW0AaXdv-nyrxmYgi0ewTdleO_aUbxeJEC_YBOiFb3mIZWgQs/s1600/no-country-for-old-men-coin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw6kzUzVDz27cIjKuW2lK6QSNQi_hxu4Qokc6GRrDVy_juXj1_0BUrPmwB3iD50LJUCPSU3PgadwGVZjI-UqG89pEMaAvW0AaXdv-nyrxmYgi0ewTdleO_aUbxeJEC_YBOiFb3mIZWgQs/s640/no-country-for-old-men-coin.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>3. <i>No Country for Old
Men</i></b> (2007)<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s not that I don’t believe Frederick Jackson Turner’s <i>Frontier Thesis</i> claiming the West closed
in 1890, it’s that I don’t believe the frontier—conquerable, virgin, feminized
land awaiting our manifest destiny—ever existed. <i>No
Country for Old Men</i>, as true an adaptation as exists, isn’t a Western in
terms of genre iconography but is revisionist in putting to rest the mythology
of rugged individualism and rough justice.
Uncanny in its reflection of our time, it manages to metaphorize our
murky quagmire of modern morality with the devious concision of a coin flip.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>2. <i>Rebecca</i></b> (1940)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Romantic only in the sense that its relationships run
medieval and supernatural in turns, <i>Rebecca</i>’s
search for identity post aut propter the myth of juvenility is drawn from the
same frightening well that gave us both <i>Snow
White</i> and <i>Persona</i>. They’re favorite themes for Hitchcock, but the
chaos at the moral of the axiom “through fire, nature is reborn whole” is indelible.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>1. <i>The Apartment</i></b>
(1960)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Louis C.K. recently said, when forced to pin down genre for
his new series “Horace and Pete”, “It can be funny. And also not.
Both. I believe that ‘funny’
works best in its natural habitat. Right
in the jungle along with ‘awful’, ‘sad’, ‘confusing’ and ‘nothing’.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course this is true and everyone believes it. But just like C.K.’s idiosyncratic prose, the
joy is often more than the humor; it’s in the invitation to the human
infrastructure of the artist’s jungle.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>The Apartment</i>
differs from many Oscar pictures because it doesn’t manipulate us into feeling
sympathetic for its largely unlikable characters. It flaunts its abrasiveness in a world where
post-War’s idyllic America was built on a crisis of masculinity, a patriotic
duty to consumerism, and prescribed domesticity because it recognizes its
sham. Humanity is frail in the wake, but
we’re in it together. That’s what the
audience clings to, and that’s why we can laugh together.<br />
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<div style="text-align: right;">
return to <a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2016/02/every-oscar-best-picture-ranked-part-1.html#more">part 1</a> or <a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2016/02/every-oscar-best-picture-ranked-part-2.html">part 2</a></div>
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-45608701834080230592016-02-26T02:04:00.001-07:002016-02-27T17:16:57.833-07:00Every Oscar Best Picture Ranked (Part 2 of 3)<div class="MsoNormal">
In the <a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2016/02/every-oscar-best-picture-ranked-part-1.html">first installment</a> of Every Oscar Best Picture Ranked, we learned that I have little patience for prestige pictures marked by under-representation. #OscarsSoWhite? Oscars white by design. In this installment I blaspheme Audrey Hepburn and deify Bing Crosby. I wouldn't have guessed it either.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmeRDnA2Jk263jZJM3vBtiadM_dN4hQYBulJsyXsQncOecFtnYdBd5JMLp64NrKqiK5ANC2l9GuHR3In7c9pRjL8K34UOwx96tR9nKumsjyHdtRwwBFTnn026SiHDDVbGwEis2PFiH3q0/s1600/argo-jack-kirby-hotel-of-hawkana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmeRDnA2Jk263jZJM3vBtiadM_dN4hQYBulJsyXsQncOecFtnYdBd5JMLp64NrKqiK5ANC2l9GuHR3In7c9pRjL8K34UOwx96tR9nKumsjyHdtRwwBFTnn026SiHDDVbGwEis2PFiH3q0/s320/argo-jack-kirby-hotel-of-hawkana.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Actual fake concept art for the real fake Argo by Jack Kirby</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>45. <i>Argo</i></b> (2012)<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A vastly enjoyable suspense film bolstered by the fact that
its primary message seems to be that (even imaginary) movies can literally save
lives. It doesn’t amount to much more
than empty calories and resonates like tin can, but it’s a ride I’d take again.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>44. <i>My Fair Lady</i></b>
(1964)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s difficult for me to pin down what I like about <i>My Fair Lady</i>. I never really buy its romance because
Higgins and Pickering are such great closeted characters. It looks beautiful, but never escapes its
staginess which makes it nigh irrelevant.
I love Audrey Hepburn despite being left with a great amount of
uncertainty as to whether she can act, dance or sing. On paper, it should add up to an unholy mess
and I’m reminded that I also love <i>The
Lizzie McGuire Movie</i>. The heart has
its reasons something something.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>43. <i>Schindler’s List</i></b>
(1993)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A thesis titled <i>How to
Shift Your Paradigm</i> could be written using, as its exclusive example, my
relationship with <i>Schindler’s List</i>. I vehemently argued against this film as a
young man and, while I still believe the tenets I stood for, I don’t trust my
intentions. I went through a spell where
Spielberg films were verboten as the anti-indie. I later distrusted the film as a product of a
blockbuster wunderkind wanting another key to the city. Later, as a prestige picture that garnered
the most praise of a decade for its subject and presentation rather than by
being prestigious. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Only, after years of back and forth, I have to admit it is
prestigious. No matter the kind of film
Spielberg makes, I can’t diminish his unparalleled gift for visual
storytelling. What’s more, Spielberg
doesn’t have a reputation of working with—but creating—big stars. Neeson, Fiennes and Kingsley are all great. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My biggest problem with the film is the life it took on as <i>the</i> historic representation of arguably
the biggest event of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century—a film made by a Jew, lauded
by a largely Jewish Academy, supposedly about the Jewish experience—yet it has
no central Jewish characters. It’s like
the old trick of the Western which makes its heroes both conquerors and victims;
I’m not certain that we need what would become <i>the </i>Holocaust story to be about a golden-hearted Nazi.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a name='more'></a><br /></div>
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<b>42. <i>The Broadway
Melody</i></b> (1929)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are at least two more big surprises landing in the top
half of my list (all three have probably been derogatorily described as
“quaint”), but, my God, people hate this movie.
It won Best Picture at a time in which the Academy wasn’t even sure what
it meant. Yes, it looks dated. So does <i>The
Godfather</i>. When it comes to Velvet
Underground songs, “Sister Ray” is far from essential in my book, but we
wouldn’t have The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” without it. Similarly, the world is a better place
because of this:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>41. <i>The Bridge on the
River Kwai</i></b> (1957)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the pillars of cinema that I find somewhat
inflated. Its comments on war are, I
believe, <i>perceived</i> as subversive but,
though it works are a character study, it doesn’t really add up to much for me
thematically. For such an economical and
craftsmanlike director, I still think this film gets away with some confusion
at its climax.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<br />
<b>40. <i>From Here to
Eternity</i></b> (1953)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is the <i>Titanic</i>
of the ‘50s: a handsome woman’s picture with enough “cinema of attractions”
appeal for its male audience. Like <i>Kwai</i>, it is somewhat undeserving of its
reputation but has star power and classic drama in spades. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<br />
<b>39. <i>The Life of Emile
Zola</i></b> (1937)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the saddest examples of the Academy’s unintentional
nocuousness toward its own cultural product was its tendency to honor American
films with decidedly European subject matter as if geography would transfer
dignity by osmosis. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRwMnHlfA1yZ-TfgW-22jHWXxEvjyh2g0k4RhR0kKEDSQDMO4kBUlatA0uXg2sMpRaAw-4nAl4T4LY3cB6ibVbd0YBYZli0fHLj843wJkO1SZpjogVWsWSWlI26jcGlZxWUkbYxDKVuJk/s1600/maurice-chevalier-gigi-thank-heaven.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRwMnHlfA1yZ-TfgW-22jHWXxEvjyh2g0k4RhR0kKEDSQDMO4kBUlatA0uXg2sMpRaAw-4nAl4T4LY3cB6ibVbd0YBYZli0fHLj843wJkO1SZpjogVWsWSWlI26jcGlZxWUkbYxDKVuJk/s400/maurice-chevalier-gigi-thank-heaven.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thank heaven the age of consent was 13 in turn-of-the-century France</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>38. <i>Gigi</i> </b>(1958)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Surprise! I think <i>Gigi</i> is kinda great in its confident
gaudiness. I don’t know how many of its
cap feathers are due to Minnelli being denied Best Director for An American in
Paris, but the film had the gusto to give a 70-year-old Maurice Chevalier the
“Thank Heaven for Little Girls” number and it lands as charming rather than
pedophilic. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>37. <i>Midnight Cowboy</i></b>
(1969)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Have you seen this thing lately? The performances are still ace, but its
cynicism certainly feels contrived within the environment of New Hollywood’s
birth.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>36. <i>West Side Story</i></b>
(1961)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just about all the accolades thrust upon <i>West Side Story</i> in its time were
incorrect. Praising its social realism
seems a joke in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century, and I’m not even sure I like it as
a musical. It strains for a represent a
hip, youth culture but is charming where it is square. It lacks any effortlessness that marked
Hollywood’s classic musicals, but makes up for it in style and production
design writ large. It’s a social message
film and a musical that works in spite of not holding up on either
account. I’d say it’s a testament to the
malleability of Shakespeare, but that shortchanges it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>35. <i>An American in
Paris</i></b> (1951)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a genre, the musical has done well for itself with the
Academy compared to other audience favorites like the horror film and the
Western, but <i>An American in Paris </i>is
the full package. Gene Kelly appears as
effortless as always, but the Academy got it right in honoring the film with awards
for Art Direction-Set Decoration and Costume Design which pull more than their
fair share in this Minnelli masterwork.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<br />
<b>34. <i>You Can’t Take It
With You</i></b> (1938)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Frank Capra’s cracker-barrel moralism and relentless patriotism
seems like the sort of attitude the Academy would have eaten up in its
time. Strangely, the only other Capra
film to score big on Oscar night seems risqué by comparison. <i>You
Can’t Take It With You</i> isn’t fantastic as a screwball comedy but is
undeniably timely, earnest and heartfelt <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>33. <i>Gone With the Wind</i></b>
(1939)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is a difficult film.
It’s racist, it’s whitewashed, it established a precedent in the Academy
of the “proper” kind of roles for minorities and then patted itself on the back
for it. It’s difficult for me to give
much of a damn about, but it’s also difficult not to admire from a technical
standpoint. At times strikingly
beautiful with an ugly underbelly, it’s also difficult to watch with fresh
eyes. I think it is enough to say that
it’s not one of the greats, but is undeniably important. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<br />
<b>32. <i>The Silence of the
Lambs</i> </b>(1991)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My problem with <i>The
Silence of the Lambs</i> isn’t that it doesn’t quite do its source material
justice but that it has been outdone by adaptations before (<i>Manhunter</i>) and since (“Hannibal”). It seems disappointing because it’s merely
good where it should have been great.
Hopkins feels like something of a cartoon character, but it doesn’t take
away from the power it had over me as a 12-year-old who had just seen his first
R-rated movie.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>31. <i>Platoon</i></b> (1986)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another war film for which the populace confused broad
character tropes and romanticized madness for realism. I often want to like Stone, but subtlety is
rarely a part of his pedantic repertoire.
Fortunately his earnestness goes a long way in a film that gives a damn
without—as so many of his later films do—trying so hard to look like it gives a
damn.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>30. <i>Gentleman’s
Agreement</i></b> (1947)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Few films on this list have aged worse than <i>Gentleman’s Agreement</i>, but this is not
entirely the fault of the picture. It reaches
an important balance of presenting straightforward ideas unconventional to the
screen in its day without overstatement.
Modern viewers are likely to wrap those two modifiers (“straightforward”
and “overstated”) in a ball with “corny” and find the pill difficult to
swallow, but it was unconventional in its day: Wealthy Jews didn’t want the
film made and the National League of Decency pushed back against a character
being a divorcee. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The film lacks subtlety and any roughness around the edges,
and that’s a problem. What it did do, in
1947, was challenge audiences to see that well-intentioned, middle-class
Americans can be racist without being outwardly hostile. Any movie that broaches the topic today is a
liberal circle-jerk. We could use an
updated version that unpoliticizes race and makes the culture say “oh.” It’s an obvious lesson we haven’t digested.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>29. </b><i><b>Amadeus</b> </i>(1984)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Top three scenery-chewing film of all time, with a bullet.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>28. <i>The Departed</i></b>
(2006)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is the 21<sup>st</sup> Century’s <i>Reservoir Dogs</i>: an unnecessary remake of a recent Asian crime film
for which the American critics gave way too much credit to the auteur
theory. Which is to say it’s quite good
but nowhere near top tier Scorsese.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>27. <i>The Godfather:
Part II</i> </b>(1974)<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Once, as a teenager, I accidentally inserted cassette two of
<i>The Godfather: Part II</i> into the VCR
and watched it for twenty minutes thinking Coppola adopted European arthouse
sensibilities of obtuse narrative with an absence of opening titles. I love this anecdote because, while I have
never worshipped at the altar of Coppola, my bungle allowed me to see the
film’s colors more vividly.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>26. <i>American Beauty</i></b>
(1999)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This film met me at a sea change. I was a waffling college sophomore in the
middle of changing my major. I was in
love with someone way too young. Elliott
Smith’s music spoke to me. Stanley
Kubrick had recently died and that damn plastic bag tied it all together. I understand it is trite, but I’ve maybe seen
this movie more than any other. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I even tried impressing on my dad (with whom I had something
of a strained relationship at the time) how I found it life affirming and
thought it might mean something to him.
I’ve never been 100% on this, but I’m pretty sure he thought I
recommended the movie because I was trying to tell him I was gay. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, there you have it.
It might be jejune, but the interpretations can still be multifaceted. <o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>25. <i>Patton</i></b> (1970)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m hard-pressed to come up with a better or more
appropriate one-man show from one of the all-time great actors for the
part. What’s more, the script is
deviously sticky which must have been no small feat in the Vietnam era. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>24. <i>The Hurt Locker</i></b>
(2009)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A Western that takes place in the desert of a
never-conquerable frontier starring Jeremy Renner as a cowboy whose effusivity
is filtered through post-9/11 nihilism. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>23. <i>The Best Years of
Our Lives</i></b> (1946)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Though often seen only as a pejorative, all movies are
manipulative. The success of a film is,
rather, not based on its level of perceived manipulation, but on how well it
earns us allowing ourselves to be manipulated.
<i>The Best Years of Our Lives</i> is
a heavy picture that dared speak about the atrocities of war through the prism
of pathos. It earns it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>22. <i>How Green Was My
Valley</i></b> (1941)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In which a middle-tier John Ford film autologically paints
the sublimity of our relationship with the past. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<b>21. <i>Mrs. Miniver</i></b>
(1942)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Easy to unfairly dismiss as a melodramatic
alternate-universe picture, it’s important to see <i>Mrs. Miniver</i> for what it is: a contemporaneous film about a global
issue that tried to stay level-headed despite the creeping terror of Pearl
Harbor. It feels, in tone and message,
very much like a picture the British would posthumously tell about themselves
were the weltanschauung not deracinated by unimaginable tragedies like the
Holocaust and the atomic bomb. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I speculate there are many reasons contemporaneous conflict films
are scarce: disparate perspective, lack of hindsight, the economics of politics. It’s a shame that a modern, lazy response to
a film like <i>Mrs. Miniver</i> as “quaint” might
also be a detractor.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>20. <i>One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest</i></b> (1975)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As pure a modern Oscar template as exists. What this says about female representation
I’ll leave for you to decide.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>19. <i>Grand Hotel</i></b>
(1932)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve often said that I don’t believe in too much
subjectivity when it comes to film criticism; that there are right and wrong
answers in the liberal arts or we wouldn’t talk about them. The caveat with <i>Grand Hotel</i> is, what I love about film isn’t always a matter of
scorecard. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Its direction is pedestrian, its script is, at times,
unbearable, and there are performances that would make the Pope weep. None of this, however, makes it any less
watchable as the ineffable quality of its star power burns like the heat of one
thousands suns. It’s an imperfect film I
much enjoy spending my time with.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<b>18. <i>Going My Way</i></b>
(1944)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Leo McCarey could really say something about old age and, if
sentimentality is a dirty word, no one ever clued him in on it. There’s no bitter to the sweet, as there
would be in <i>Make Way For Tomorrow</i>,
but the film is worth watching to marvel at Barry Fitzgerald alone.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I saw how high this was ranking on my list, I was
prepared to do a fair amount of apologizing.
The more I think about it, I shouldn’t have to apologize for what brings
me joy while marrying religion to social justice. Yeah, yeah, rose-colored glasses. I’m diabetic and I’d like to think this gives
me a little authority on sweet.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<b>17. <i>Hamlet</i></b> (1948)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And the Oscar for Best Skull in a Motion Picture goes to…<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>16. <i>Marty</i></b> (1955)<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s strange to me that <i>Marty</i>
ever won Best Picture. In a decade of
pre-sold, conventional films, the most familiarity America had with the source
material was from the cinema’s prime rival— the television version—which was
produced two years earlier. <o:p></o:p><br />
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The film version takes away the television version’s
qualities of intimacy and liveness, but credit it to its writing and
performances (and certainly budget to some extent), the film version is the
better realized of the two. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<b>15. <i>Casablanca</i></b> (1942)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Casablanca</i> is
almost critic-proof. It’s so well-structured,
well-written, and Bergman and Bogart are so iconic it exudes classic
Hollywood. It’s a very above-average
movie and it’s a shame that the direction is such a bummer. Curtiz is a workhorse, sure, but there is
nothing definable about his visual work here.
We’re left with a very good play that probably would have sounded
fantastic on radio. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>14. <i>The Godfather</i></b>
(1972)<o:p></o:p></div>
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What is often simplified as a critique on American
capitalism largely misses the point that <i>The
Godfather</i> is most interesting in its character duality. Loyalty to familial ties leads to death. Religious devotion is juxtaposed against violence. The powers that be puff their chests to compensate
for their failed institutions. Yet it’s
the characters—the ethnic, the naïve, the loyal characters—irrational optimism
towards the American dream is what makes <i>The
Godfather</i> so fascinating. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>13. <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i></b>
(1962)<o:p></o:p></div>
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A true epic masterwork, Lean’s <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i> is one of the rare films that should be required
annual viewing. It’s the rare example of
traditional Hollywood outdoing the French New Wave movement in an era where the
epic wasn’t en vogue. It’s old-fashioned
but timelessly breathtaking.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>12. <i>The French
Connection</i></b> (1971)<o:p></o:p></div>
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In today’s segment of “Life of a Cinephile” our hero plays <i>Scene It?</i> with a group of friends when
an “All Play” round resembling “Wheel of Fortune” pops up. As letters slowly appear, the puzzle reads:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
_ H E<o:p></o:p></div>
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_ R E _ C H<o:p></o:p></div>
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C O _ _ E C _ _ O _<br />
<br />
His wife excitedly blurts out “THE WRENCH COLLECTION.” End scene. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>11. <i>All About Eve</i></b>
(1950)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Perhaps <i>the</i> most
universally loved of all Best Picture Winners, <i>All About Eve </i>presents bully performances and lands in a perfect
niche between what the 1940s saw as prestigious (European, literary) and what
the 1950s saw as safe (conservative, pre-sold).
It’s its own brand of cinematic genius for which the stars aligned. <o:p></o:p><br />
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<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2016/02/every-oscar-best-picture-ranked-part-1.html">return to part 1 here</a> | <a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2016/02/every-oscar-best-picture-ranked-part-3.html">continue to part 3 here</a></div>
</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-51189464117375962102016-02-25T01:06:00.003-07:002016-02-27T10:31:33.642-07:00Every Oscar Best Picture Ranked (Part 1 of 3)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQLmePguI2jvVE3LXSTGBzluK7LogfaqElfFjv_oiwBgi7Dl21FUCzdZJzivm2NZJHgBvk5VTNVQk-z2uWWOfHor8gD4hXqmFXu6cuKxYI8QVVeZFrBnhXqXQqMJ5DCq2Y9_9rlgSYKJc/s1600/anne-baxter-all-about-eve-award.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="473" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQLmePguI2jvVE3LXSTGBzluK7LogfaqElfFjv_oiwBgi7Dl21FUCzdZJzivm2NZJHgBvk5VTNVQk-z2uWWOfHor8gD4hXqmFXu6cuKxYI8QVVeZFrBnhXqXQqMJ5DCq2Y9_9rlgSYKJc/s640/anne-baxter-all-about-eve-award.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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A friend was shocked to learn, about ten years ago, that I
hadn’t seen all of the Academy’s Best Picture winners. Like the IMDb 250, it’s a benchmark of
quantitative substance to many but means absolutely nothing to me. I’m not here to gripe about snubs or give
tiresome arguments about who should have really won. I’m the sort of rare pretentious populist who
not only thinks the Academy was correct in selecting <i>Annie Hall</i> over <i>Star Wars</i>,
but also thinks <i>Rocky</i> is better than <i>Taxi Driver</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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No, my beef with the Academy isn’t that a group of insiders
rarely pick the best movie of any given year (by my count, this has happened
once ever; odds so poor it must indicate we’re simply not judging the same
merits), it is that the barometer by which they judge is rarely film for the
sake of film. This is not the same as
films about film (which they love), or films which emulate an air of prestige
(something they love even more).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Only this year have I seen every Best Picture winner and,
trust me, the last few films I begrudgingly got to like a tattered honey-do
list I’d correctly judged sight unseen.
These aren’t all great films.
Hell, I’d only call about two-thirds of them decent, but that’s not
really a fair point. The first Academy
Awards, held in 1929, might indicate why this is. <o:p></o:p></div>
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That year, two different “Best Picture” awards were handed
out, though neither was called such. The
first award went to box-office hit <i>Wings</i>
which won the award intended to honor “the most outstanding motion picture
considering all elements that contribute to a picture’s greatness.” The second award, given to F.W. Murnau’s <i>Sunrise: A Story of Two Humans</i>, honored
“the most artistic, unique and/or original motion picture without reference to
cost or magnitude.” This states, in no
uncertain terms, that artistry, uniqueness of vision, and originality apart
from box-office success or in-house production are not <i>really</i> considered “elements that contribute to a picture’s
greatness.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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Both of these films find their way onto my rankings, and we
will see where my metric and the Academy’s might not jibe. The more I see these films (as the fact I
continue to follow the awards every year might indicate) the more I understand
how the intention to honor films which make statements about the human condition
get confused with films that make statements about the industry’s
condition. Film has, from its inception,
been relegated to the kiddie table at the banquet of the Seven Arts despite
incorporating all seven into its recipe.
The Academy would do well to honor its medium’s fluidity rather than continuing
to fall into the trap of dressing up in big sister’s clothes, failing to
recognize it reached maturity long ago. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On rare, inspired evenings, it’s done this at least a dozen
times. Bear with this doggedly
unabridged list which is more cultural pastiche than cinematic milestone. These titles are by no means essential
viewing. Many would not be remembered
were it not for the catch-22 of the Academy both handing out these awards and,
worse, by the template the Academy has created which suggests these are the
type of films deserving of them. A toast
to when the snake doesn’t eat its own tail!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a name='more'></a><br />
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<b>88. <i>A Beautiful Mind</i></b>
(2001)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Opie goes for gold in this graceless remake of <i>The Life of Emile Zola</i> in which our hero,
rather than risking imprisonment in the name of justice, endangers his family
in the prison of self-denial and mental illness. He wins the Nobel, the film wins Best
Picture. Sorry Emile, there is no
justice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>87. <i>Crash</i></b> (2005)<o:p></o:p></div>
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A left-handed, self-congratulatory social message picture in
which its Black characters are still carjackers and its Persian characters, the
victims of post-9/11 racial profiling and hate crimes, become terrorists who
shoot children at point blank range. No
dice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>86. <i>Driving Miss Daisy</i></b>
(1989)<o:p></o:p></div>
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In consecutive years of America’s pre-Rodney King,
post-Reagan dog-whistle politics, Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” wins
Song and Record of the Year at the Grammys and <i>Driving Miss Daisy</i> wins the Best Picture Oscar. COINCIDENCE?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>85. <i>Dances with Wolves</i></b>
(1990)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The last bastion of the Academy’s identity crisis throughout
the ‘80s which understood enough to know our mythologies were being rewritten
to incorporate historically misrepresented voices but still only knew how to
tell this story as a White fantasy. See
also: <i>Out of Africa</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy1eZwqxDbCZYKd2y8gMC1f_ASpG5s2kN2TSFu3B4TEC-MpiH3BgiQ_yvxZRCbsVn357ivvTRUM8hjNHnVYccWtQDVBTSVzCtnGzo6GK8RiLr_CSRoGu2YIe4JTOA-jM0xOEdX6QZm51U/s1600/slumdog-millionaire-dance.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy1eZwqxDbCZYKd2y8gMC1f_ASpG5s2kN2TSFu3B4TEC-MpiH3BgiQ_yvxZRCbsVn357ivvTRUM8hjNHnVYccWtQDVBTSVzCtnGzo6GK8RiLr_CSRoGu2YIe4JTOA-jM0xOEdX6QZm51U/s1600/slumdog-millionaire-dance.gif" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Surprised Danny Boyle didn't order a tornado of Holi powder </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<b>84. <i>Slumdog
Millionaire</i></b> (2008)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Fast food “poverty porn” which elects for cultural
appropriation as the world’s second-most populous nation wins the lottery and
pulls of a “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” dance number. Some days America puffs its chest and says
the days of White culture accessorizing brown people as props without criticism
are numbered. Other days <i>Slumdog Millionaire</i> wins Best Picture.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>83. <i>Forrest Gump</i></b>
(1994)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Jungian nightmare cycle contained within one of the most
complex cultural decades of America’s young history is glossed over at a
third-grade level. Stupid is, indeed.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>82. <i>Million Dollar
Baby</i></b> (2004)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The only true character in this piece is its hot button
issue. Everyone else is window dressing.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>81. <i>Chariots of Fire</i></b>
(1981)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Best Picture winners of the early ‘80s oscillated
between funereal kitchen-sink melodramas and maudlin pablum. The result might have been zero sum, but it
doesn’t make me want to pick sides. This
film, belonging in the latter category, manages to be both skeletal and
self-absorbed. My main takeaway is
hearing its theme played on lite-rock radio in my mom’s minivan alongside
Ambrosia and Christopher Cross. While
this certainly isn’t cool, it’s not a knock in and of itself, it just serves as
a reminder that dopaminergic and dopey have the same source. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>80. <i>The Greatest Show
on Earth</i></b> (1952)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hollywood had an identity problem in the 1950s. With the new threat of in-home rival
television, Hollywood doubled down on strange gimmicks rather than innovating
its medium. This is the same era that
gave us CinemaScope and 3D glasses. The
movies got physically bigger, but were narratively stodgy and rooted in
escapism. The theory is America’s
collective mindset was so jarred after the atrocities of World War II,
Hollywood tried banking on conservative, pre-sold ideas.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Few movies pretend to be as big, as gaudy, and as escapist
as a film which literally titles itself “The Greatest Show on Earth.” It isn’t, of course, but its selection by the
Academy says a lot about an industry which always seems miles behind when it
faces crisis.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>79. <i>Cavalcade</i></b>
(1933)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Generations before the coined phrase “first world problems,”
<i>Cavalcade</i> is, at the very least,
consistent in keeping its abundant exploitation of real world tragedy in the
background.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>78. <i>Out of Africa</i></b>
(1985)<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Where is, according to the film’s own underrepresentation,
the place where Africans must live?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>77. <i>The English
Patient</i></b> (1996)<o:p></o:p></div>
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I promise I did not set this up on purpose, but this film
perfectly marries my beef with the previous two films on the list. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>76. <i>Chicago</i></b> (2002)<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is one of those films that isn’t bad, per se, but will
forever be canonized because of its Academy selection while it would have
otherwise been forgotten. As
well-intentioned, fumbling teenagers brushing up on film history download this
into their brain (or however film will be consumed) in another hundred years,
this one will seem a real anomaly.
Outside of blaming ill-placed classicism, I’m not sure how to account
for it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>75. <i>Titanic</i></b> (1997)<o:p></o:p></div>
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If <i>Chicago </i>is the
Academy’s balk at ill-placed classicism, <i>Titanic
</i>is its homerun. It combines the
sensationalist— even barbaric— amusements of early cinema with the stodgy,
pre-sold conservative larger-than-life cinema of the 1950s. More than anything, it was an <i>attraction</i>, and, what’s more, became the
highest grossing film of all time. What
is not for the Academy to love?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>74. <i>Around the World
in Eighty Days</i></b> (1956)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Another ‘50s “epic” that promises the cinema of attractions
and delivers flat, safe, and tone-deaf direction instead. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>73. <i>Terms of
Endearment</i></b> (1983)<o:p></o:p></div>
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I used to make a big deal about <i>Kramer vs. Kramer</i> being the #1 movie in America on the day I was
born and how I hated it as if a born contrarian. But that’s not really fair. I don’t hate <i>Kramer vs. Kramer</i>, but, after seeing it usher in an era of
prestigious human condition flicks that the academy loved (it was followed by <i>Ordinary People</i> and <i>Terms of Endearment</i> all in a four year span), I do find it strange
that the post-war melodramas were never offered Academy accreditation until Roe
v. Wade.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>72. <i>Rain Man</i></b>
(1988)<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is the kind of pap served up to launch a well-respected
director into Oscar immortality by virtue of a pandering cartoon
character. Worse, there is something
genuinely interesting untapped here that streams “could have been.” Worse yet, despite my fandom, it’s a bottom
three Tom Cruise performance.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>71. <i>Gladiator</i></b>
(2000)<o:p></o:p></div>
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A least-common denominator <i>Ben-Hur</i> from a director who, like James Cameron and Peter Jackson,
is lauded for creating the wrong kind of film world. All CG, no heart.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokcE7lFDmEOzPM-NCSbed9NLP2AaFwZPdlQL6f2zRY4zE-yYdv5bxPoQDTkB3s4JMC3InqmD0Hl9GdFx5aqgy1IedL4iR8s-1xXvNkrKDfNKSD6VXDWC6yULgJ_Oqyx1McevD-cdf-AU/s1600/SoundOfMusic-naziflag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokcE7lFDmEOzPM-NCSbed9NLP2AaFwZPdlQL6f2zRY4zE-yYdv5bxPoQDTkB3s4JMC3InqmD0Hl9GdFx5aqgy1IedL4iR8s-1xXvNkrKDfNKSD6VXDWC6yULgJ_Oqyx1McevD-cdf-AU/s320/SoundOfMusic-naziflag.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Strangely, one of the film's more subtle moments</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>70. <i>The Sound of Music</i></b>
(1965)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Would this be a lesser movie if the entire last act and Nazi
subplot were removed completely? Would
anyone love it less if it were a mere 130 minutes? I’m always astounded that, for such a
one-woman show, the rest of the screen is sure stuffed with unlikable, droll
characters.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>69. <i>Shakespeare in
Love</i></b> (1998)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In my ideal alternate universe, Kevin Williamson penned <i>Shakespeare in Love</i>. I never cared that it beat <i>Saving Private Ryan.</i> It doesn’t bother
me that it has the weight of a blown dandelion.
1998 was a big year for self-referentiality, but I can tell you I’ve
watched the entire series of “Dawson’s Creek” twice since I’ve thought to
revisit this. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>68. <i>Birdman or (The
Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)</i></b> (2014)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A film that attempts to vilify Hollywood’s franchise
inclination and eat its cake too, lecturing a one-dimensional critic in a film
the critical establishment’s herd mentality deemed critic-proof. If the critic’s job is to trace culture’s de
Broglie-Bohm theory, expressing what is objective in our souls about the arts,
it also must expose pretention and find poetic words for the ineffable. <i>Birdman
or</i> (as its awful title suggests) turns out to be quite effable. Eff <i>Birdman</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>67. <i>A Man for All
Seasons</i></b> (1966)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Apropos that this ranks back-to-back with <i>Birdman</i>: Pauline Kael wrote, “perhaps
people think <i>A Man for All Seasons</i> is
so great because unlike the usual movie which is aimed at 12-year-olds, it’s
aimed at 12-year-old intellectuals and idealists.” I don’t think this is what Werner Herzog
meant when he claimed film was the language of the illiterate but, given the
choice between the two, the older I get the more I’ll take the regular
12-year-old movie, thank you.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>66. <i>Cimarron</i></b>
(1931)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Cimarron</i> is in a
strange position of being hated where it would have otherwise been merely
forgotten. I imagine many who name it as
one of the least-deserving Best Picture winners haven’t seen a ton of 1931
films. Audiences weren’t sure if sound
pictures were anything more than a gimmick and artistry took a back seat as the
industry’s top directors experienced a rough learning curve in both cinematic
language and technology. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is probably more than coincidence that the Academy Awards
were ushered in at the same time as the sound era: major studios tightened
their grip on the types of movies being produced as well as how and where they
would be shown. The Academy started
giving themselves awards as a way to legitimize their monopoly which ensured
their top product would be seen.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That <i>Cimarron</i>—dated
though it is—remains watchable in the 21<sup>st</sup> century is nearly an
endorsement.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>65. <i>The Last Emperor</i></b>
(1987)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I mean, this thing is O.K.
Yes, it’s overlong. Yes, it is
another in the Academy’s ugly tendency to honor exotified travelogues. Yes, it is unquestioningly Oscar bait but it
does so without pandering. That it
doesn’t strike my purview as resonant probably speaks more about its genre than
its craft. See also: <i>Gandhi</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>64. <i>Ordinary People</i>
</b>(1980)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Makes <i>Terms of
Endearment</i> look like a student film by comparison, but proof that
Hollywood’s harrowing, painfully translucent domestic dramas were European
knock-offs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>63. <i>Braveheart </i></b>(1995)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You know how in <i>The
Sound of Music</i> the nuns bitch and bitch about how Maria won’t stop singing,
but they do so almost exclusively in song?
That’s how I feel about <i>Braveheart</i>’s
message that the brain eludes the need for the battlefield. Lip service no one in their audiences bite.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>62. <i>12 Years a Slave</i></b>
(2013)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A film which shares more with <i>Crash</i> than anyone would like to admit: a message picture one could
call “preaching to the choir” if there were enough seats for every viewer in
the choir. It’s a film about slavery in
the sense that we all perfunctorily agree it was bad. Perfectly adequate but lacking
sustenance. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>61. <i>The Great Ziegfeld</i>
</b>(1936)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps my biggest surprise in constructing this list was
learning <i>The Great Ziegfeld</i>—a musical
produced near sound film’s infancy—is 179 minutes long. I know I love William Powell more than the
next guy, but that my fondness for this film has overlooked its
impossible-on-paper runtime is as ringing an endorsement as imaginable.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGMcM4IdoJK_5TmFb5TZImrXG4HPqm5ItmYUKzSMCybnW96TWr_I5G4vliWmMV51bZ_zlNc5h4ioM5gYrvXGUiEueg9djDUBqrrzB2FSQYqeeKPZfPu9C4jTtiEMNnzRYfvjuEmSuPM9w/s1600/gandhi-extras.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGMcM4IdoJK_5TmFb5TZImrXG4HPqm5ItmYUKzSMCybnW96TWr_I5G4vliWmMV51bZ_zlNc5h4ioM5gYrvXGUiEueg9djDUBqrrzB2FSQYqeeKPZfPu9C4jTtiEMNnzRYfvjuEmSuPM9w/s320/gandhi-extras.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bonus trivia: every Indian citizen is actually an extra in the film</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>60. <i>Gandhi</i></b> (1982)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Stuffy, sure. And
that runtime is a lot to overlook. But
perhaps what bothers me most about <i>Gandhi</i>
is, for a biopic about a man who marked his life with unpretentiousness, it
sure paints each humble stroke with deliberate weight. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>59. <i>The Artist</i></b>
(2011)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I love to see a 21<sup>st</sup>-Century romantic-comedy win
Best Picture. It’s just a shame that its
only means for doing so are to appeal to heavy-handed, self-reflexive gimmick. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>58. <i>In the Heat of the
Night</i> </b>(1967)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is a fine film with noble intentions that just looks
like it’s trying a little too hard.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>57. <i>Wings</i></b> (1927)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The biggest issue I have with this film is it being the
benchmark people measure silent film against simply because it is an Oscar
winner. Silent was a rapidly advancing
poetic language the film industry pumped the brakes on for the sake of
industry. The era of the same industry
saw these awards created for similar pursuits.
<i>Wings</i> is a decent spectacle
film, but no one ever described it as poetic.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>56. <i>The King’s Speech</i></b>
(2010)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A film of great actors sitting in great rooms interacting
with great dialogue. It’s Firth’s
showcase picture and a lobbed softball for director Hooper who treats the
material without condescension. The
period is openly nostalgic for the Miramax pictures of the ‘90s. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>55. <i>The Deer Hunter</i></b>
(1978)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My beef with <i>Schindler’s
List</i> is that it creates sympathy for the wrong side while marginalizing
history’s true victims. <i>The Deer Hunter</i> is guilty of the same
thing but adds opportunism to its list of offenses. That Francis Ford Coppola met Cimino at his
hotel room in December 1978 to concede, “you beat me, baby” is enough to want
to put <i>Apocalypse Now</i> back under the
microscope.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>54. <i>Ben-Hur</i></b> (1959)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What better way to cap a decade of stodgy, escapist,
conservative prestige films than with a three-and-a-half hour sword-and-sandals
flick that set the record for most-ever Oscar wins? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>53. <i>All the King’s Men</i></b>
(1949)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s rarely a good idea to define something by lack, but,
all cards on the table here, I don’t remember this movie well at all. I know I saw it about eleven years ago during
an era in which I consumed an awful lot of TCM.
Its lack of impression on me leads me to believe it was morally obvious
in a self-serious, Frank Capra kinda way.
My IMDb vote tells me I liked it (I originally gave it a 7/10. This score still holds water considering its
rank in my overall bell-curve), but I should probably revisit this even if it
seems like a poor man’s <i>Citizen Kane</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>52. <i>Oliver!</i></b> (1968)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite my adverse reaction to non-<i>Little Rascals</i> children mugging for the camera, the fact that I
often find Dickens haughty and tedious, and that much of <i>Oliver!</i>’s direction feels like a Carol Reed puppet was behind the
camera, I like much of <i>Oliver!</i> In spite
of myself. It has an undeniable, clunky
charm and is the kind of movie I’m excited to share with my daughter in a few
years.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>51. <i>The Lost Weekend</i></b>
(1945)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the pantheon of Billy Wilder movies, this is bottom
half. It is like <i>All the King’s Men</i> in that it borders on melodrama in its obvious
morality play.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWXb5buJgBhhYJRHr1BdQJn-YIQlU0YCX46ITYRosAOSxtDgeEkAFawkN5MpU5k4nOew_X50GJhVNc-eZrVK9SQCq0Xd9-j3Mll7htCqk9LekGJtoHBoYaXGwH83LQJdtcQwPu6zGveYc/s1600/you-wouldnt-steal-a-handbag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWXb5buJgBhhYJRHr1BdQJn-YIQlU0YCX46ITYRosAOSxtDgeEkAFawkN5MpU5k4nOew_X50GJhVNc-eZrVK9SQCq0Xd9-j3Mll7htCqk9LekGJtoHBoYaXGwH83LQJdtcQwPu6zGveYc/s320/you-wouldnt-steal-a-handbag.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>50. </b><i><b>The Lord of the
Rings: The Return of the King</b> </i>(2003)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>The Return of the King</i>
winning Best Picture is the Oscar equivalent of Neil Portnow’s annual Grammy speech
about how the Internet is scary: a franchise-achievement award for a group of
films that pulled over $3 billion in box office (despite it being given to the weakest
installment) at a time when we still had to watch the “you wouldn’t steal a car”
PSA in front of major studio DVDs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>49. <i>The Sting</i></b> (1973)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>The Sting</i> feels
like the last hurrah of classic Hollywood before the new school took over by
the middle of the decade. Newman and
Redford have charisma, but it feels crusty, inconsequential and a pretender
when held up against the classics it’s often paired with.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>48. <i>Kramer vs. Kramer</i></b>
(1979)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In light of the #OscarsSoWhite movement and what it means
for Hollywood’s representation of race, class and gender, it is telling that
this progressive domestic drama essentially demonizes the mother at the end of
second-wave feminism. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>47. <i>Tom Jones</i></b> (1963)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This feels like a sanitized Pier Paolo Pasolini movie told
through face-value formal language of the French New Wave. Somehow, that’s not exactly an
endorsement. I love an irreverent comedy
winning Best Picture, I’m just not sure <i>Tom
Jones</i> is the one I’m ready to get behind.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>46. <i>Mutiny on the
Bounty</i></b> (1935)<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The struggle is real for a film connoisseur to not presume
older movies are classic, better movies by age alone.
That remakes aren’t verboten on principle. That formal and thematic innovation doesn’t
trump other quantifiable metrics in measuring a film’s value. It is with some pride that I discovered the
top seven movies on this list are each from different decades, but I still
finding myself making excuses treating <i>The
Great Ziegfeld</i> like a guilty pleasure.
Fortunately, Frank Lloyd’s <i>Mutiny
on the Bounty</i> requires no apologies: its action and drama are timeless.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;">
<a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2016/02/every-oscar-best-picture-ranked-part-2.html">continue to part 2 here</a></div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-43449371474232793742016-01-29T23:27:00.000-07:002016-01-29T23:40:36.016-07:00Bizarro Oscars: 88th Academy Awards – Dream Ballot<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtYL6FoUSTZ5tv5L9ODC1bQT23ii8AjnYj0iiRdizqlgk3UMqxZB9Y30RCN7RIDSpqqgUsGuzaWvheWxW_FDB-rHFoGG2DzTw6pdoZ3Hm9t1Qz7gJYmul4h3-PbS4pki8ToCVBcfRC_UA/s1600/bizarrooscar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtYL6FoUSTZ5tv5L9ODC1bQT23ii8AjnYj0iiRdizqlgk3UMqxZB9Y30RCN7RIDSpqqgUsGuzaWvheWxW_FDB-rHFoGG2DzTw6pdoZ3Hm9t1Qz7gJYmul4h3-PbS4pki8ToCVBcfRC_UA/s320/bizarrooscar.jpg" width="222" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bizarro Oscar<span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">™</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I have seen 97 of the 305 films the Academy deems eligible for the big prize this year. It would have been 98, but I accidently watched Shyam Madiraju's <i>Eden</i> instead of Mia Hansen-Løve's <i>Eden</i>. I regret it too; I'm only one man! This is the second year of my Bizarro Oscars™ in which I choose what would be my dream ballot and winners within the Academy's limitations.<br />
<br />
That is to say, these are neither traditional projections nor snub-talk but a mostly useless, Kanye-inspired take on awards which insists there are correct answers in the liberal arts and acknowledging merit should be more reverent than business or spectacle.<br />
<br />
A few inevitable words about diversity: nothing on this list is deliberately affirmative action. The concept of participation awards is insulting. That these nominations are more diverse than the actual nominations speaks less about the opportunities of lead roles for minorities and more about the fact that, upon seeing 97 films, your worldview changes. That's the power that should be celebrated with film: its visual language galvanizes the human spirit. <br />
<br />
How powerful is it to see representation in something like <i>Tangerine</i> that it makes a liberally didactic film like <i>Boys Don't Cry</i> seem tone-deaf by comparison? Hollywood (and the Academy at the elite end of the establishment) has an unquestionable problem with representation. How much of this is perpetuated by voters not watching more films? How much is inflated self-importance failing to recognize that great films change us and not the other way around?<br />
<br />
Speaking of inflated self-importance, here are my humble nominations if the Oscars were my one-man show: the 88th Academy Awards as given by FlickdomDictum.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSEVEPiiuSAejjstyUOYyhvEk_P_vd8C7ufGbemoCHZ-HTB5yuBHzeIz5qoUQn8Wm32eX8poFry2qNpiP84bTAQ-BPQh34lK4h7lhYXMwlTOQJlX5AqJKxKP0rQ79UFFCIccYWEZ9sjKI/s1600/ruffalo-spotlight.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSEVEPiiuSAejjstyUOYyhvEk_P_vd8C7ufGbemoCHZ-HTB5yuBHzeIz5qoUQn8Wm32eX8poFry2qNpiP84bTAQ-BPQh34lK4h7lhYXMwlTOQJlX5AqJKxKP0rQ79UFFCIccYWEZ9sjKI/s640/ruffalo-spotlight.png" /></a><br />
<b><br /><u>ACTOR –in a Leading Role</u></b><br />
<br />
I've been on this Ruffalo bandwagon so long, here's where the rubber hits the road. While I don't feel entirely comfortable with Ruffalo in this category as <i>Spotlight</i> is more of an ensemble piece and he doesn't dominate screentime the way Fassbender or Sarsgaard does, I also can't deny that everything I liked about <i>Spotlight</i>'s perfectly acceptable but mostly pedestrian nature had to do with Ruffalo's understated performance. Not bad for a film poised to take home Best Picture.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Mark Ruffalo – <i>Spotlight</i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Michael Fassbender – <i>Macbeth</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Peter Sarsgaard – <i>Experimenter</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Kurt Russell – <i>Bone Tomahawk</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Kevin Corrigan – <i>Results</i></div>
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<b><u>ACTRESS –in a Leading Role</u></b><br />
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As with last year’s <i>Listen Up Philip</i>, Elisabeth Moss is again ineligible for her role in <i>Queen of Earth</i>. Alex Ross Perry must not play this Oscar game. Honorable mention to Rooney Mara who is the true, unrecognized lead in <i>Carol</i>, a film in which the populace has largely misunderstood her projection onto the title role. I had a worse problem choosing between Chiara D'Anna and Sidse Babett Knudsen in <i>The Duke of Burgundy</i> and couldn't. Lots of great female roles this year.<br />
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<b>Charlotte Rampling – <i>45 Years</i></b></div>
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Rinko Kikuchi – <i>Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter</i></div>
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Juliette Binoche – <i>Clouds of Sils Maria</i></div>
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Kristin Wiig – <i>Welcome To Me</i></div>
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Karidja Touré – <i>Girlhood</i></div>
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<b><u>ACTOR –in a Supporting Role</u></b><br />
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This category sees two <i>Star Wars</i> actors in non-<i>Star Wars</i> roles. Tom Noonan gets a nod, but I'm not sure exactly what the role is. Caveat on Paul Dano who isn't so much an actor in a supporting role as an actor as a supporting lead. <i>Love & Mercy</i> isn't great, but Dano kind of is. How much of this is by comparison to the film's odd casting of John Cusack remains to be seen. The real shame is that John C. Reilly is ineligible for his role in <i>Entertainment</i>.<br />
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<b>Adam Driver – <i>While We’re Young</i></b></div>
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Tom Noonan – <i>Anomalisa</i></div>
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Oscar Isaac – <i>Ex Machina</i></div>
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Mark Rylance – <i>Bridge of Spies</i></div>
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Paul Dano – <i>Love & Mercy</i></div>
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<u><b>ACTRESS –in a Supporting Role</b></u><br />
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Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth is close to category fraud as a supporting role, but she's so damn good it gets a pass. 2015 was a great run for Jennifer Jason Leigh, though the Academy picked the wrong role. Girls Just Want To Have Fun, indeed. Still, if anyone has the right to boycott because #OscarsSoWhite, it's Jada.<br />
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<b>Jada Pinkett Smith – <i>Magic Mike XXL</i></b></div>
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Kristen Stewart – <i>Clouds of Sils Maria</i></div>
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Alicia Vikander – <i>Ex Machina</i></div>
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Marion Cotillard – <i>Macbeth</i></div>
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Jennifer Jason Leigh - <i>Anomalisa</i></div>
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<b><u>ANIMATED FEATURE FILM</u></b></div>
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There is little beef to be had with the Academy's picks this year. I realize I'm the oddball in where I diverge here. <br />
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<i><b>Anomalisa</b></i></div>
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<i>When Marnie Was There</i></div>
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<i>Shaun the Sheep Movie</i></div>
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<i>Boy & the World</i></div>
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<i>The Good Dinosaur</i></div>
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<b><u>CINEMATOGRAPHY</u></b><br />
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This is where things get weird for me. Hao Hsiao-Hsien's <i>The Assassin</i> was submitted as Taiwan's selection for Best Foreign Language film, but didn't even make the shortlist. Not only is this egregious, it is then not considered as an eligible production in the other categories despite having a theatrical U.S. run. Is this a clerical error the equivalent of Cash Money not filling out the right paperwork to get "Hotline Bling" considered for the Grammys, or did Hou's team simply not care? That's pretty punk now matter how you cut it, but it's a shame as I would have nominated <i>The Assassin</i> in several categories. </div>
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<i><b>Macbeth</b></i></div>
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<i>Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter</i></div>
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<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></div>
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<i>Experimenter</i></div>
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<i>‘71</i></div>
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<i>
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<b><u>COSTUME DESIGN</u></b><br />
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There was a strange stretch in December where I inadvertently watched <i>Fresh Dressed</i>, <i>Saint Laurent</i>, <i>Iris</i> and <i>Yeezy Season 2</i> within 24 hours. I realized how people must feel when they vote in these categories. Again, <i>The Assassin</i> is ineligible and I probably would have given it this award.</div>
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<i><b><br /></b></i>
<i><b>Carol</b></i></div>
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<i>Macbeth</i></div>
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<i>Far From the Madding Crowd</i></div>
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<i>Crimson Peak</i></div>
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<i>Bone Tomahawk</i></div>
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<b><u>DIRECTING</u></b><br />
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Despite this year's deluge of young, impressive talent, it's hard to root against George Miller here. For a veteran who Hollywood relegated to directing <i>Happy Feet</i> movies, to have the vision to not only see this genre spectacle through, but capture critical imagination is no small feat.<br />
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<i><b>Mad Max: Fury Road</b></i></div>
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<i>Anomalisa</i></div>
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<i>Macbeth</i></div>
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<i>‘71</i></div>
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<i>It Follows</i></div>
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<b><u>DOCUMENTARY FEATURE</u></b><br />
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Another awards show, another year of having no idea as to the process behind what is eligible for documentary awards at the Oscars. Both <i>What Happened, Miss Simone?</i> and <i>Winter on Fire</i> are nominated for Documentary Feature yet are ineligible for other production awards. I can't say I fully understand the acclaim for <i>Amy</i>, especially as this year saw the best music documentary since <i>The Devil and Daniel Johnston</i>.<br />
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<i><i><b>Seymour: An Introduction</b></i></i></div>
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<i><i>3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets</i></i></div>
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<i>The Look of Silence</i></div>
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<i>Call Me Lucky</i></div>
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<i>The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution</i></div>
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<b><u>FILM EDITING</u></b><br />
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I'm not being deliberately contrarian here, but the disparity between my picks and the Academy's in this category speaks volumes. <i> Spotlight</i> and <i>The Big Short</i>? Certainly industry people know that editing is more than stitching together multiple storylines.<br />
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<i><b>‘71</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></div>
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<i>It Follows</i></div>
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<i>Macbeth</i></div>
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<i>Creed</i></div>
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<b><u>FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM</u></b><br />
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I don't particularly hold great fondness for <i>Goodnight Mommy</i> and I imagine it would have easily been bumped by <i>Rams</i> if I were able to have seen it. Then again, I still haven't seen Oscar favorite, <i>Son of Saul</i>, so what do I know? I know I say it every year, but, this category is broken.<br />
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<b><i>The Assassin</i></b></div>
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<i>A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence</i></div>
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<i>Theeb</i></div>
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<i>Mustang</i></div>
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<i>Goodnight Mommy</i></div>
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<b><u>MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING</u></b><br />
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I mean, I probably pick <i>Fury Road</i> even if there was no Doof Warrior.<br />
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<b>Mad Max: Fury Road</b></div>
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Carol </div>
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Macbeth </div>
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<b><u>MUSIC –Original Score</u></b><br />
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If you would have told me at the beginning of 2015 that I would only pick <i>The Hateful Eight</i> as a nominee in one category, I would have assumed that's because the Oscars changed formats. That the category is Original Score is even more depressing despite Ennio Morricone's fine work here. I'm confused by the term "original," as the "song" category makes it very clear that variations on existing themes is a no-no. That this score was salvaged from a previous work seems fishy in terms of eligibility.</div>
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Either way, the point is moot as the real force <i>Star Wars</i> has awakened is John Williams who brings to the project a vitality long dormant in the master. The bookends of Rey's theme were already playful, when I discovered <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBTvyVQMv9A">THIS</a> happened, I couldn't believe it!<br />
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<i><b>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</b></i></div>
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<i>The Hateful Eight</i></div>
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<i>Macbeth</i></div>
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<i>Carol</i></div>
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<i>The Good Dinosaur</i></div>
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<b><u>MUSIC –Original Song</u></b><br />
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I can't NOT throw shade at this category and have long held to the adage "if we can't expect the Academy to pick the right films, how can we expect them to have any authority over another of the arts?" Perusing the 79 songs vying for nomination, a sequel should be written to the much maligned <i>Save The Cat! </i>which instructs the LEGO®-musician equivalents of hack screenwriters how to write an Oscar-nominated song. </div>
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That is to say, of all the talk about Oscar diversity, why is there no outcry over how plunking three-somber piano chords against a hired string section and hottest (if disinterested) set of pipes works every time. I try hard not to be contrarian in these pieces, but I'm kinda contrarian here. So I picked a dated Swedish pop star singing Swedish, a diegetic piece that sounds like FKA twigs, a song that<span style="text-align: center;">–</span> since the Oscars are always 15 years behind the times<span style="text-align: center;">– sounds like 1998-era Heather Nova, and that Weeknd song because I respect the guy for the most part and it's funny that <i>Fifty Shades of Grey</i> was nominated for an Oscar. Give the trophy to the guy from Ash, I don't care. This category is the pits.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qAKCpoLhMME" width="480"></iframe>
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<b><i>Shaun the Sheep Movie</i>; Tim Wheeler "Feels Like Summer"</b></div>
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<i>Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words</i>; Eva Dahlgren “Filmen om oss”</div>
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<i>Altered Minds</i>; Erin Sax "Happy"</div>
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<i style="font-style: italic;">Creed</i>; Tessa Thompson "Grip"</div>
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<i style="font-style: italic;">Fifty Shades of Grey</i>; The Weeknd "Earned It"</div>
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<b><u>PRODUCTION DESIGN</u></b><br />
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
A few notes about <i>Carol</i>: I've long admired Todd Haynes and the writing of Patricia Highsmith, the acting is top-notch and Haynes has always excelled at emulating period. That said, <i>Carol</i> is nowhere near the top of my list of favorite films on the year. It just happens to excel at a certain pedigree of categories that win film awards.</div>
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The same could be said of <i>Far From the Madding Crowd</i>, the difference being that one looks deliberately literary and is the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of filling out costume or hairstyle nominees. </div>
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Like the work of a gaffer, this fine-tuning can go unnoticed. These aren't fill-in-the-blank selections and I hope this is evident by the absence of films like <i>The Danish Girl</i> and <i>Woman in Gold</i>. I do care about my nominees.</div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Macbeth</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Far From the Madding Crowd</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Carol</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Duke of Burgundy</i></div>
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<b><u>SOUND EDITING</u></b><br />
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It really is bizarre that Stallone's bid at supporting actor is the only nomination <i>Creed</i> got. I think that speaks a lot about what it does well and <i>how</i> it does it. The breathtaking choreography of the two-round one-take is so kinetic it doesn't draw attention to itself with a self-reflexive smugness of Iñárritu falling into his own navel. The cinematography and editing are unpretentious by design. Its everyman affectations are no different than <i>Rocky</i>'s were in 1976, only those formal and thematic decisions must look as passe as <i>Rocky</i> looks square to the cynical New Hollywood idolaters still crying about <i>Taxi Driver</i>. Yet Stallone, the most archaic element of the film, gets the kudos.<br />
<br />
But still, not even a <i>sound</i> nomination?<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>'71</i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Creed</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></div>
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<b><u>SOUND MIXING</u></b><br />
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It sucks that I only have Yann Demange's <i>'71</i> winning technical awards because of the insinuation that the technical awards aren't poetic. Not so here as the sound design is a proud example of form following function both narratively and thematically.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>'71</i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Creed</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Macbeth</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation</i></div>
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<b><u>VISUAL EFFECTS</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
I'm the kind of guy who has <i>Pan</i> and <i>Tomorrowland</i> nominated instead of <i>Jurassic World</i> and <i>Avengers: Age of Ultron</i>. This is not, as you might think, because I lean toward less being more in terms of visual effects, it's more that I admire earnest garishness. I'm the kind of guy that, eight years on, cheers the <i>Indiana Jones</i> fridge nuke. The Eiffel Tower scene in <i>Tomorrowland</i> is extraneous and clumsy. That it is also salient and iconic is one of those ineffable miracles of cinema.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Mad Max: Fury Road</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Ex Machina</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Pan</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Tomorrowland</i></div>
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<b><u>WRITING –Adapted Screenplay</u></b><br />
<br />
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, <i>The Assassin</i> is ineligible in this category, but the point is moot. Most of the year's best films had no previous source material and my nominees in the adapted category largely resort to instances where source material is its own franchise. <i>Macbeth</i> wins this, hands-down, turning what is wordy and stagy by nature into the visually arresting.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Macbeth</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>45 Years</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Creed</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Ned Rifle</i></div>
<br />
<br />
<b><u>WRITING –Original Screenplay</u></b><br />
<br />
Calling Charlie Kaufman "original" sounds dismissive: as if relegating his cinematic universe to quirk distances our experience from his uncomfortable truths. Like Wes Anderson post-<i>Darjeeling Limited</i>, I feel like Kaufman has to resort to Kickstarter because public perception is that he is a child daydreaming in a turgid corner. <br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Anomalisa</i> speaks to the artificiality of the medium and, in doing so, traverses the uncanny valley. The puppets have hauntingly lifelike expressions which are tempered by deliberately visible seams to accentuate the drum-tight tale of chronic disconnect. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Anomalisa</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>‘71</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>It Follows</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Clouds of Sils Maria</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiavjx4VIHwYOSNVclihuW93RdCRlHxNifcPSjK4Fzty7qLAxLRgWNg1XLY459q_6ToIllDcVTSmxovZHgOCmLhCaELchNp9dJgW3g6HY0zA4J88N8-sqdkiQapsbQWsInZQoYgJb3uQGk/s1600/anomalisa-puppet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiavjx4VIHwYOSNVclihuW93RdCRlHxNifcPSjK4Fzty7qLAxLRgWNg1XLY459q_6ToIllDcVTSmxovZHgOCmLhCaELchNp9dJgW3g6HY0zA4J88N8-sqdkiQapsbQWsInZQoYgJb3uQGk/s640/anomalisa-puppet.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<b><u>BEST PICTURE</u></b><br />
<br />
In which I give the world's most biarro-Oscar to an animated film. A non-Pixar animated film. A stop-motion puppet film. Where its two principals have a one-night stand and everyone else looks like Tom Noonan. It's weird. Yet what is most bizarre is that it is the most human picture of the year.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Anomalisa</b></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Macbeth</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>‘71</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>It Follows</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>45 Years</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Ex Machina</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Clouds of Sils Maria</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Bone Tomahawk</i></div>
</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-32251166658082720782016-01-22T20:28:00.000-07:002016-01-22T23:36:07.610-07:00The Short-Sightedness of the #OscarsSoWhite Movement and White Invisibility<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The media attention mounting around the #OscarsSoWhite
movement reminds me of another recent, misguided liberal agenda in Los Angeles
race relations: the treatment of Donald Sterling. Though the statements of then-L.A. Clippers
owner was unquestionably abhorrent and racist, much of the media reaction was
best summarized by then-ESPN reporter, Jason Whitlock who called it “a
ratings-pleasing mob hell-bent on revenge” built out of “our zeal to appear
righteous or courageous or free of bigotry.”<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
The Oscars are an easy scapegoat here, but a boycott is the
equivalent of turning off the Super Bowl because of the NFL’s concussion crisis
despite being a season-ticket holder with your kid in pee-wee football. The problems with racial representation in
Hollywood are foundational and they will not be fixed by the Academy adding an
okie-dokie sixth affirmative action nominee in the acting categories.<br />
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Not to subvert <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/01/film-and-race">TheEconomist’s numbers</a> against their initial point (which I agree with), but an
analysis of their chart of proportional underrepresentation shows that the
Oscars are pretty on-target with their nominations inside of roles offered by
race. The problem is not the Oscars, it’s
the industry.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If I had an Oscar vote, it would still go to Charolotte
Rampling in <i>45 Years</i> despite her
antiquated quote today suggesting the #OscarsSoWhite movement is reverse
racism. She said in a French interview, “Why classify people? We live in countries where now everyone is more or less accepted.” Right-wing bandwagoneers have followed with comparisons to its concerns of
university acceptance and military promotion as if it were possible for a color-
and gender-blind meritocracy to govern fields embedded in white male
privilege. I’m not here to argue the
validity of white privilege, I’ll leave that to Richard Dyer:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"[W]e can't see that we have anything that accounts for our position of privilege and power. This is itself crucial to the security with which we occupy that position. As Peggy McIntosh argues, a white person is taught to believe that all that she or he does, good and ill, all that we achieve is to be accounted for in terms of our individuality. It is intolerable to realise that we may get a job or a nice house, or a helpful response at school or in hospitals because of our skin colour, not because of the unique, achieving individual we must believe ourselves to be.</blockquote>
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"But this then is why it is important to come to see whiteness. For those in power in the West, as long as whiteness is felt to be the human condition, then it alone both defines normality and fully inhabits it."</blockquote>
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A common meme spread by opponents to #OscarSoWhite suggests
roughly 13% of Oscar nominations have gone to Black actors in the last 20 years,
analogous to their U.S. demographic. By
this faulty logic, we could project a recently published list of the <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/vultures-most-valuable-stars-of-2015.html">100 MostValuable Stars in Hollywood</a> by <i>Vulture</i>
to be roughly 63% White.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Surprise! The list is
actually 90% White. And here’s a few
examples of when it isn’t: Idris Elba’s 2015 was characterized by a role as a
Ghanan guerrilla commandant in <i>Beast of
No Nation</i> and by significant resistance to the idea of a Black man playing
James Bond.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Lupita Nyong’o, the sole Black woman on the list (coming in
at #100, no less. Token?), was relegated to voice
a strange alien thing in <i>Star Wars</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Additionally interesting, neither of these actors is
American. Opponents to #OscarsSoWhite
often ask, tongue-in-cheek, where the Latino and Asian voices are in this
condemnation. My answer would include
the question: what opportunity would we have to hear it? Would the media cover their disenfranchised
voices, or is their lack of Hollywood representation part of this problem as
well?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hollywood is not, and has little interest in being, a meritocracy
as its lead roles aren’t distributed on an even playing field; productions are
founded on old, White money. The Oscars
boycott is a misguided liberal-agenda not because it is incorrect but because
it doesn’t go at the throat of structural racism. The power of the representation of Whiteness
in Hollywood film is precisely that we aren’t inclined to see it. If movie roles aren’t written to be
specifically ethnic, they are rarely filled with ethnic stars. And when they are, they’re often stereotyped.</div>
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If Hollywood has had no incentive to change its racial
representation it is because its audience isn’t challenging the structure of
its racial representation.
#OscarsSoWhite would do well to question why— even in films about
historical accounts— films choose to tell mostly White stories with mostly White
heroes. The impetus cannot be solely
economical as largely diverse casts in <i>Star
Wars – The Force Awakens</i>, <i>Furious 7</i>
and <i>Avengers: Age of Ultron</i> were not
only three of the four highest grossing films worldwide in 2015, but three of
the top seven grossing films of all-time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Audiences aren’t opposed to diverse casts. That White male actors dominate lists like <i>Vulture</i>’s speaks less to their own merits
as to our expectancy to see lists like this filled with White actors. Because Hollywood films are filled,
disproportionately, with White male actors.
The snake eats its own tail.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s not that #OscarsSoWhite, it’s that #HollywoodSoWhite,
and there is no great solution. The answers,
though few, are largely economic. Go see
the new Spike Lee joint when it hits your theater, then maybe this important,
didactic voice won’t have to resort to Kickstarter. Seek out the disenfranchised, film is its language. The exhibition model makes it easier today
with VOD. If you’re going to pirate a
movie, don’t let it be <i>Dope</i>, or <i>Tangerine</i>, or the upcoming sci-fi film
by Claire Denis. Maybe do something
outlandish like wait to see <i>Jurassic
World</i> via Redbox.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s a frightening thought that representation will likely
change in sloth-moving politics before it changes in Hollywood, but Latino
numbers seem to be imminent. Hollywood
representation, however, will not shift unless their bottom line is challenged
or “ownership” at the studios changes. If
the #OscarSoWhite movement can make enough noise to move sponsors, maybe some
eyes will open. If it starts
conversation about lack of representation in top Hollywood roles, even better.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This ship will neither right itself, nor be corrected with a
kneejerk boycott; its problems are generations old. And not to sound too utopianistically
libertarian about it, but what we find unacceptable about race representation can
be aided more by the films we patronize than by Twitter-fueled armchair activism. I think the success of the <i>Fast & Furious</i> franchise echoes this
in longwave format.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is nothing scary about acknowledging White privilege. The idea that, one day, the Jennifer Lawrences
and Bradley Coopers of the industry will have their careers hampered by lesser
talent needed to fill racial quotas is the worst kind of institution-blind
scaremongering. Of course #OscarsSoWhite. HollywoodAlwaysBeenSoWhite. The outrage toward a <a href="http://jezebel.com/5896408/racist-hunger-games-fans-dont-care-how-much-money-the-movie-made">Black Rue</a> or <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/12/21/3734243/rowling-reacts-to-black-hermione/">Hermione</a>
confirms the strangeness of ethnic heroes even in supporting roles. The outrage toward a Black James Bond? It falls on the “lesser” side of everyone
being, as Rampling said, “more or less accepted.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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That the Oscars found no room to nominate Jada Pinkett Smith
or Michael B. Jordan this year is disappointing. What is far more insulting is that Emma Stone
played a Chinese-Hawaiian character in <i>Aloha</i>
this year. That Johnny Depp played Tonto
in 2013. That Hugo Weaving wore yellowface
in <i>Cloud Atlas</i>. If stereotypically ethnic roles are still
cast to White actors to wide acceptance, what chance do minority actors have of
being considered for lead roles when Whiteness is invisible in a colorblind society?</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-62457582112135391772016-01-17T01:31:00.000-07:002017-01-10T15:11:24.238-07:00The 50 Best Films of 2015<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2015 is a strange year for film which a purgatory of many notable films plateau at "very good" but few forge the final summit of "exceptional." Early in the year, at the decade's halfway point, I combed through my list to come up with an in-progress <a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2015/02/my-top-100-films-of-decade-so-far.html">top 100</a>. I've never written about nearly as many as 50 films in a year-end recap which speaks to the strength of this year's output through, proportionally, the year is underrepresented with only (currently) 13 entries. Worse, only two in the top 30. To put it another way, I had <i>Clouds of Sils Maria</i> on my 2014 list despite its 2015 U.S. release. It was #13 on my 2014 list. It would have been #4 on this one.<br />
<br />
Perhaps part of the problem is unfair expectation as five of my top ten <a href="http://flickdomdictum.blogspot.com/2015/01/my-thirtyone-most-anticipated-films-of.html">most anticipated movies</a> of the year weren't released. A few other auteur pieces not only missed their mark but became my least favorite of their directors' filmographies (<i>Crimson Peak</i>, <i>The Hateful Eight</i>). Yet there's plenty of time for these titles to grow as some certainly have (<i>Macbeth</i>, <i>45 Years</i>) even in a short spell.<br />
<br />
2015 also marked my first opportunity to work on an independent film and this unexpectedly changed my view of the medium. Experiencing the fruitful, collaborative process first hand paints the auteur theory as something of a sham: on an abbreviated seven-day shoot with Hollywood talent, I witnessed the bare-bones façade of the medium stripped of its magic yet also sat on a barstool providing passive fill onto Tom Sizemore and was overcome with emotion that actors can evoke like a switch. In a way, the best I ever aspire to provide on this blog is passive fill.<br />
<br />
I post this ever-growing list before it becomes irrelevant despite its deficiencies. Notable absences awaiting to be screened include (in order of decreasing interest) <i>In Jackson Heights</i>, <i>The Babysitter Murders</i>, <i>Of Men and War</i>, <i>Approaching the Elephant</i>, <i>Rams</i>, <i>Horse Money</i>, <i>Heart of a Dog</i>, <i>Son of Saul</i>, <i>James White</i>, <i>The Forbidden Room</i>, <i>The Second Mother</i>, <i>Grandma</i>, <i>Hitchcock/Truffaut</i>, and <i>The Salt of the Earth</i>. <br />
<br />
I don't mean to sound unenthusiastic; 2015 was a very fertile year of challenging films Much to my surprise, I even quite enjoyed <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i> which is a good analogy for the year: it's surprising, what it does well it does quite well, but I'll do well to temper my enthusiasm. Here's to a couple Malicks in 2016.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>50. <i>Right Now, Wrong Then</i></b></span> (d. Hong Sang-soo)<br />
<br />
The bittersweet lilt of Richard Linklater told through Jim Jarmusch's extended takes by way of Takeshi Miike's proliferation, the films of Hong Sang-soo are regularly, mockingly autobiographical and thematically repetitive. His latest, <i>Right Now, Wrong Then</i>, takes this one step closer to parody by telling its same central narrative twice. Like our personal failures-- ones which we would never accept from film characters but repeat in endless cycles-- its characters are hard-wired and victims of circumstance more than we'd like to admit. Perhaps too much characterization is forced onto our director protagonist through passive dialogue, but I forgive it under the presumption that public figures must often struggle in rectifying their true selves against public opinion. It's human and I hear its music. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">49. <i>Taxi</i></span></b> (d. Jafar Panahi)<br />
<br />
It's impossible to not admire the ardor that drives Jafar Panahi's mission. Arrested and charged with -propaganda against the Iranian government and sentenced to a six-year jail term and twenty-year ban from filmmaking, media interviews and foreign travel, Panahi has emerged from jail (post-hunger strike) a relentless punk. He now thumbs his nose at this hypocrisy by naming his illegal films <i>This Is Not A Film</i> and having them smuggled out of the country to international festivals inside of cakes.<br />
<br />
His latest, <i>Taxi</i>, is a strange form of scripted unscripted documentary in which Panahi poses as a cab driver in Tehran. His lack of bearings despite his assumed profession is but one of many humorous indictments of a system likely to imprison him, physically or mentally, for the rest of his life. A true boundary-pusher in terms of medium, genre and legality, Panahi sacrifices everything for the truth of his art.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">48. <i>Jauja</i></span></b> (d. Lisandro Alonso)<br />
<br />
As a big fan of Gus Van Sant's death trilogy, it comes as no surprise that I admire the niche of <i>Jauja</i>'s expectation shirking and meditative cinematography. What I was unprepared for was a sci-fi ending that floored me.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">47. <i>Pan</i></span></b> (d. Joe Wright)<br />
<br />
An interesting thesis could be written in twenty years comparing the critical and commercial success of big-budget, recycled children's stories directed at young women this decade (<i>Maleficent</i>, <i>Cinderella</i>, <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>) to their counterparts, dismal failures directed at young men (<i>John Carter</i>, <i>The Lone Ranger</i>, <i>Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters</i>, <i>Jack the Giant Slayer</i>).<br />
<br />
Be it a failure in marketing or irrelevance to audiences, Joe Wright's <i>Pan</i> has earned its place alongside the latter. A shame, too, as it has more panache, mythos and humanity than any of this year's superhero movies.. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">46. <i>Ned Rifle</i></span></b> (d. Hal Hartley)<br />
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I came for Parker Posey and Aubrey Plaza. I stayed for the Vonnegut per viam Aristophanes.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">45. <i>Blackhat</i></span></b> (d. Michael Mann)<br />
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Nobody does balletic viscera or crowded violence better than Michael Mann. That he is one of America's best visual storytellers and has fallen out of critical favor in electing for straightforward projects which parallel his effortless gift is laughable considering how the highly lauded and the didactic often go hand in hand. He's an action director who would make Eisenstein weep. It is no small feet that the chaos is always comprehensible. More than that, beautiful. Tell me this isn't the Odessa steps.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">44. <i>Girlhood</i></span></b> (d. Céline Sciamma)<br />
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Sciamma remains a favorite here in terms of blog traffic and <i>Girlhood</i> continues her tradition of discovering superb young talent. The dance scene to Rihanna's "Diamonds" is, perhaps, the most honest scene in cinema this year.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">43. <i>Appropriate Behaviour</i></span></b> (d. Desiree Akhavan)<br />
<br />
Akhavan's debut feature is a welcome entry in this decade's fertile genre of "women-in-their-late-twenties-who-don't-have-their-shit-together comedies". What's refreshing is our protagonist's express naiveté in a genre often filled with too-cool-for-school culture bullies. It's Lena Dunham without the "Girls" soundtrack and Eloise tattoo.. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">42. <i>She's Funny That Way</i></span></b> (d. Peter Bogdanovich)<br />
<br />
Here’s what critics said that RottenTomatoes won’t tell you:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“[His] job on this film could hardly be called inspired.” – <i>Toledo Blade</i> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><o:p></o:p></i>“The film proceeds… to a [too] conventional ending.” – <i>The Sydney Morning Herald</i> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i></i>“[T]oo pat and precocious, too confounded cute, and the
humor has a dogged sameness.” – <i>Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette</i> </blockquote>
These are not the criticisms of film scholar Peter Bogdanovich's latest panned film, but of Ernst Lubitsch's <i>Cluny Brown</i> published in 1946: the <i>Sullivan's Travels</i> to <i>She's Funny That Way</i>'s <i>O Brother, Where Art Thou</i>. Lubitsch's final film was neither a significant box office nor critical success and I fear Bogdanovich might join him in closing out his career to wide disinterest.<br />
<br />
What RottenTomatoes <i>will</i> tell you is that <i>Illegally Yours</i> holds a 0% approval rating and, perhaps, its as critically en vogue to make a screwball comedy in the classical style in the politically distraught 2015 as it was to make a reverent Hollywood musical (<i>At Long Last Love</i>) in the cynical, subversive New Hollywood of the 1970s. Lubitsch's 91% Tomatometer score for <i>Cluny Brown</i> exposes the anachronism that critics often revere the bygone. Strange that when Bogdanovich has crafted straight-laced genre love letters to the bygone era, groupthink calls it uninspired, too conventional and pat. <br />
<br />
The time for a reevaluation of Bogdanovich's output is now. He is a national treasure born into the wrong generation who will be long gone before the critics send their flowers.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">41. <i>Slow West</i></span></b> (d. John Maclean)<br />
<br />
2015 marks the second year in a row that a Scottish indie-rock pioneer I greatly admire made a surprise directorial debut with a reverent genre film. Perhaps 2016 will be the year Mogwai make their titular horror debut?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>40. <i>Tangerine</i></b> </span>(d. Sean Baker)<br />
<br />
Every time I hear someone in Iñárritu's camp sell the spectacle of their cinematography in the name of art, I think of <i>Tangerine</i> which was also shot with largely natural light, but on an iPhone. A humble case of content alongside form, free of pretension,<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: large;">39. <i>Results</i></span></b> (d. Andrew Bujalski)<br />
<br />
A "romantic comedy" from the guy that brought us <i>Computer Chess</i>, <i>Results</i> basks in the same awkwardness of the former's inability to arbitrate the mechanics of human sexuality and the soul of technology, here trying to span the gap between money and happiness like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">38. <i>A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence</i></span></b> (d. Roy Andersson)<br />
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A "comedy" in the existential sense that to live this human life is a comedy, the final installment in Andersson's trilogy "about being a human being" opens with "three encounters with death." An unnamed man dies of a heart attack while his wife noisily does the dishes in the adjacent room. It's done in Andersson's signature extended single-take with an immobile camera. It is difficult to watch and is only funny in that we cope with the uncopable through humor.<br />
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My father, afraid of dying alone, has often repeated a statistic that 50% of first-time heart attacks are deadly. He had a heart attack the day after I watched this movie. I coped by visiting him in the cardiac unit and saying, "and you didn't think you were going to make it." A slight variation on this joke, my dad tells the story that I walked in and said "you didn't make it." I don't know which version is darker, but I think Andersson would get a kick out of it. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">37. <i>Spotlight</i></span></b> (d. Tom McCarthy)<br />
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A perfectly adequate Oscar frontrunner which plays it safe without offending. Here's hoping the Oscar voters double-down on their promise to recognize Mark Ruffalo rather than the early buzz which had Michael Keaton stealing his... er... spotlight. His is the rare breathtaking, understated performance that slyly steals the show.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">36. <i>World of Tomorrow</i></span></b> (d. Don Hertzfeldt)<br />
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Full disclosure: I've never liked Don Hertzfeldt. I've found his films largely misanthropic and his bleak worldview self-aggrandizing. That his crude, simplistic animation style lacks joy and beauty is consistent to his philosophy but not what I find meritorious within the medium. It's largely a personal ethic; I believe there to be right and wrong answers in the liberal arts and, if you're going to laugh yourself into a tizzy watching a stick figure bleed to death out of his own ass, by all means, don't let me stop you. But your drawing should at least look like you give a damn.<br />
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My single biggest surprise of this year was finding Hertzfeldt's foray into science fiction both moving and ingenuous. Its themes were popular in 2015: engineered consciousness (<i>Ex Machina</i>, <i>Tomorrowland</i>, <i>Jurassic World</i>), the inability to communicate what makes us human (<i>Anomolisa</i>, <i>Kumiko</i>) and the bitter acquiescence to the untrumpable passing of time (<i>While We're Young</i>, <i>45 Years</i>, <i>When Marnie Was Here</i>). I was resistant to this film, but it got its hooks in me.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">35. <i>Magic Mike XXL</i></span></b> (d. Gregory Jacobs)<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">34. <i>Two Step</i></span></b> (d. Alex R. Johnson)<br />
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One of the most pleasant surprises of the year, what Alex R. Johnson's directorial debut lacks in writing it more than makes up for in exploitation cognition. Like <i>It Follows</i>, atmosphere is palpable. Not one but two jump scares shook me; no small feat to a guy who watched 200 horror movies in the month of October.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">33. <i>(T)ERROR</i></span></b> (d. Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe)<br />
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Todd Haynes recently praised the filmmaking of Alfred Hitchcock (re: their adaptions of Patricia Highsmith) saying he had the uncanny visual gift to make the viewer feel dread and culpability in the plight of his films' protagonists. The increased avenues of distribution and the economy of digital filmmaking in the past decade has allowed this disquiet to seep into documentary with increased regularity. Last year's <i>Citizenfour</i> put us in the hotel room with Edward Snowden as he became the world's most wanted man. Now, <i>(T)ERROR</i> rats out FBI intelligence as they are communicating with informants. <br />
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We shouldn't be there and the film knows this. Part message and social justice film (while remaining relatively morally unbiased, no small feat), <i>(T)ERROR</i> is most effective as a thriller with an unease you can cut with a knife.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">32. <i>Welcome To Me</i></span></b> (d. Shira Piven)<br />
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A cousin to John Cassavetes' <i>A Child Is Waiting</i>, if it were produced by Tim and Eric rather than Stanley Kramer. Kristen Wiig would be nominated for an Academy Award in a just world.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">31. <i>Chi-Raq</i></span></b> (d. Spike Lee)<br />
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I've lamented the decline in critical acceptance to many directors in this piece (Peter Bogdanovich, Michael Mann), but none are as unjust as the film industry's treatment of Spike Lee. Perhaps the most alarming reason being that he still has it. It's an odd world in which the projects Spike <i>wants</i> to make (like <i>Red Hook Summer</i>) play in only 41 theaters at their widest release, while his outstanding documentary work on subjects such as THE BIGGEST STAR IN THE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC (<i>Bad 25</i>) get no distribution. <br />
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I hate <i>Chi-Raq</i>'s comparisons to <i>Do The Right Thing</i>. Not only because they are lazy, but because they presuppose Spike Lee has had every opportunity but for some reason or other been off his mark practically<i> since</i> Michael Jackson's <i>Bad</i>. <br />
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<i>Chi-Raq</i> is vital not in spite of, but through its polarization. Sometimes you learn art is true by the work it does in you rather than what you bring to the table. This was a lesson hard learned when I saw <i>Bamboozled</i> in 1999. And when I finally saw <i>Get On The Bus</i> a few years back. And when-- though, this time, already a member of the choir-- HBO aired <i>When The Levees Broke</i>. <br />
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Spike Lee isn't the kind of didactic voice which condescends, he's the kind of voice that acts as a termite in the system's framework. There will always be haters: Chicago rapper King Louie released "Fuck Spike Lee" on December 4 in response to Lee's call to disarm. Nineteen days later, King Louie was shot in the face and the cycle continues. Lee keeps gnawing.<br />
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Lee is never a voice which claims to have all the answers. That the film industry has relegated him to roles which largely curtail his asking questions is the crime. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">30. <i>Call Me Lucky</i></span></b> (d. Bobcat Goldthwait)<br />
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My dad has a crutch of an adage he leans on when the modern world seems overwhelming: "life was simpler in the '50s." Bobcat Goldthwait's documentary about the life of Barry Crimmins shakes that theory's foundation and leaves its viewer in a darkness without bearings.<br />
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That we learn the title to be unironic sinks us even deeper.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">29. <i>Tomorrowland</i></span></b> (d. Brad Bird)<br />
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I'm afraid Disney is going to get cold feet and pull development on "boy" adventure narratives (at least ones not named <i>Star Wars</i>) after the perceived disappointment of <i>John Carter</i>, <i>The Lone Ranger</i> and now <i>Tomorrowland</i> and stick to self-cannibalization with a decided "female" slant. <br />
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Funny as <i>Tomorrowland</i> and <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i> are both formulaic "boy" adventures with which they've had the insight to give strong female protagonists agency. Still, as with Joe Wright's <i>Pan</i>, audiences just don't seem to care.<br />
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Don't get me wrong, <i>Tomorrowland</i> is far from airtight; it takes on a lot of water. That Bird champions its sense of wonder and doesn't shy away from, but humanizes, situations which seem traditionally uncomfortable is all the more admirable. <br />
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Terrence Malick said, "When people express what is more important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's more personal about them they could only come up with what's most public." <i>Tomorrowland</i> is an at times unholy mess but it, at its heart, sweeping, tender and graceful. It's sad it lost its chance to be more public..<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">28. <i>The Midnight Swim</i></span></b> (d. Sarah Adina Smith)<br />
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A brilliant companion to Studio Ghibli's <i>When Marnie Was Here</i>, this found-footage horror film (which is neither, really, found-footage nor horror), uses a nearly all-female cast to examine how we are a continuation of our parents ghosts, how willingly we accept image as truth, and pulls no punches staring into the black.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">27. <i>The Assassin</i></span></b> (d. Hou Hsiao-Hsien)<br />
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Like the best poetry, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's long-awaited return speaks not only in non-literal terms, but perhaps unliteral ones. That is to say, I could regurgitate the synopsis I later read on Wikipedia, but it has nothing to do with how I experienced the movie. If difference suspends meaning through an endless gauntlet of signifiers, perhaps a side of <i>The Assassin</i>, like the peace of God, gladly surpasses all understanding.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">26. <i>Creed</i></span></b> (d. Ryan Coogler)<br />
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I hope in 2001 someone placed a prop bet in Vegas and paid off his mortgage on the inclination that 2015 would see the seventh <i>Fast & the Furious</i> movie, the seventh<i> Star Wars</i> movie and the seventh <i>Rocky</i> movie and that they would all be good. The odds couldn't have been much better than that of winning the $1.3 billion Powerball.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">25. <i>Entertainment</i></span></b> (d. Rick Alverson)<br />
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If <i>Seymour: An Introduction</i> and <i>Steve Jobs</i> are opposite sides of the same coin regarding how we measure out our life in coffeespoons, Rick Alverson's <i>Entertainment</i> paints us the improbability of the coin landing on its side. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">24. <i>Timbuktu</i></span></b> (d. Abderrahmane Sissako)<br />
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Political empathy is never enough for me to endorse a movie no matter how strongly I might applaud its intentions. This is a problem I have with much of the didactic, overly-serious foreign fare the Academy nominates every year and why I entered <i>Timbuktu</i> with a jaundiced eye.<br />
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Such cynicism vanished instantly and reminded me that the best films inform us about ourselves. A scene early in the movie comes to mind when armed townspeople argue over what I presumed was militant, revolutionary behavior until we learn they're debating the merits of Zinedine Zidane vs. Lionel Messi. Is it a cheap screenwriting tactic that borders on manipulative? Yes. But what is cinema if not careful manipulation that we give ourselves over to in nips. <br />
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The power of <i>Timbuktu</i> is in its forcing me to see the ugliness inside myself when I thought I was an ally. Graceful, essential viewing.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">23. <i>The Duke of Burgundy</i></span></b> (d. Peter Strickland)<br />
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Bechdel <i>test</i>? Try Bechdel doctoral thesis.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">22. <i>Louis C.K.: Live at the Comedy Store</i></span></b> (d. Louis C.K.)<br />
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In classic Louie form, C.K. almost downplayed this film upon its (self-)release by saying, "This special kind of goes back to when I used to just make noises and be funny for no particular reason." I'm telling you, though, he does this Ray Bolger impression and I laughed for about three straight weeks.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">21. <i>The Look of Silence</i></span></b> (d. Joshua Oppenheimer)<br />
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Even more subversive than <i>The Act of Killing</i>, Oppenheimer develops a harrowing scheme to troll surviving individuals culpable in the 1965 Indonesian "communist" killings under the pretense of an eye exam (an intensely powerful metaphor for how we see-- and refuse to see-- ourselves, and the dynamism of the recorded image, two more popular theme in 2015). <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">20. <i>3½ Minutes, 10 Bullets</i></span></b> (d. Marc Silver)<br />
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HBO's honest go at Janelle <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px;">Monáe and Wondaland Records' "Hell You Talmbout."</span><iframe frameborder="no" height="300" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/219074591&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">19. <i>Boy & the World</i></span></b> (d. Alê Abreu)<br />
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An idea as to the precision with which the essentially dialog-less <i>Boy & the World</i> taps into the psyche of a child, the clarity and sincerity of its worldview and the baggage with which we construct our lives as an adult: the titular boy, Cuca is crushed at the beginning of the film as his father leaves home. I spent much of the film's duration assuming the boy's parents had divorced until the father returns having found work. <br />
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The realization of my error only impressed the palpability of my fear. I am going to be a father in about five weeks. I can't wait to watch this with my daughter.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">18. <i>Experimenter</i></span></b> (d. Michael Almereyda)<br />
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Superior to, and overshadowed by, <i>The Stanford Prison Experiment</i>, Almereyda's biopic fits more nicely on a double bill with <i>Ex Machina</i>: if the latter draws empathy to the humanity of the scientist's creation, the former suggests, conversely, that it's humanity which isn't too different from the machine. The sticky part being that the truth of the discovery isn't as cold as it sounds. Peter Sarsgaard for <strike>Best Actor</strike> President.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">17. <i>No Home Movie</i></span></b> (d. Chantal Akerman)<br />
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So, David Bowie died this week. He meant a lot of things to a lot of people and his final album, released only days before his death, can almost exclusively be viewed as a rear-projection of a man grasping for immortality. It's an interesting, fairly unexplored concept of intentionally using your craft to speak from death's doorstep.<br />
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Chantal Akerman took her own life three months ago and her films meant a lot to me. Her final film, <i>No Home Movie</i>, documents interviews with her mother shortly before <i>her</i> death.in 2014 (whose own mother died at Auschwitz). The film's title, I presume, suggests a denial of timelessness associated with the medium. Akerman once said of the film medium:<br />
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"When people are enjoying a film they say ‘I didn’t see the time go by’… but I think that when time flies and you don’t see time passing by you are robbed of an hour and a half or two hours of your life. Because all you have in life is time… With my films you’re aware of every second passing through your body."</blockquote>
It's easy to project domestic anxiety onto <i>Jeanne Dielman</i> as a feminist statement, it's more difficult, in <i>No Home Movie</i>, to watch time win. Akerman said of her final film, "I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn't have dared to do it." It's more difficult to not project this same statement onto her final act. Like <i>Blackstar</i>, I will only ever be able to associate this film with her death. I only hope she found peace as the seconds counted down.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">16. <i>The Mill at Calder's End</i></span></b> (d. Kevin McTurk)<br />
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The best Guillermo del Toro film of the year which saw an actual Guillermo del Toro film, Kevin McTurk's breathtaking, atmospheric puppet film is a reverent, affecting gothic horror that would make Jan Švankmajer weep. <br />
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That's the thing about atmosphere; it doesn't matter how many screenplays I've studied or how well I know the horror tropes, when I'm rapt by a special film, its conventions still shock me. These 14 horrifying minutes are no exception. Available at <a href="https://vimeo.com/ondemand/themillatcaldersend/121005765">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">15. <i>Seymour: An Introduction</i></span></b> (d. Ethan Hawke)<br />
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My grandfather was no Philistine, but one time my friend prank called him to ask his thoughts on art. His response? "I don't know any Art."<br />
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Watching Seymour Bernstein casually philosophize like a sensei makes me feel like I don't know any art either, but it doesn't change the fact that we need it. It is the purest cinematic example of the transformative power of art in the worldview of the artist since <i>Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time</i>.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">14. <i>Bone Tomahawk</i></span></b> (d. S. Craig Zahler)<br />
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Anyone reading this blog surely understands why I would feel that this movie sells itself.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">13. <i>While We're Young</i></span></b> (d. Noah Baumbach)<br />
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I go back and forth on Noah Baumbach. On one hand (and I may be one of the only people in the world to utter these words), I sympathize with Armond White's opinion that his narratives are characterized by white first-world problems verging on solipsism. At the other end of the pendulum, former deity Wes Anderson has fallen into the irrecoverable wormhole of his own navel and Baumbach's films grow more mature in that void. <br />
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I'm not certain we're intended to condone the behavior of any character in <i>While We're Young</i> (or his also-good <i>Mistress America</i>) any more than we were supposed to condone Charles Grodin's character in <i>The Heartbreak Kid</i>. That doesn't mean we don't relate to their appalling behavior. <br />
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A friend posted a <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamisener/which-girls-character-are-you#.vmkjKK5ry">Buzzfeed quiz</a> on Facebook earlier this year calculating which "Girls" character you were. Perhaps what Baumbach understand is every answer is abhorrent and every answer is true.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">12. <i>Bitter Lake</i></span></b> (d. Adam Curtis)<br />
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No journalism is objective journalism just as no documentary is voiceless. Journalism-- like documentary filmmaking-- is a series of choices. Framing and mise-en-scène are formal decisions which can (even unintentionally) capture something in a negative light. The very nature of editing is nothing but framing an argument. Even the decision as to which story is covered by a news program is a loaded decision. Adam Curtis's advocacy journalism is-- while not uncontroversial-- the most honorable type of journalism because it admits that the concept of objective journalism is a sham. <br />
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Daniel J. Leab says of “See It Now” in the era of McCarthyism, “[Edward R. Murrow] did not believe in objectivity for its own sake. He saw no value in balancing Hitler evenly against Churchill.” This is a personal opinion as well as a moral decision, and I believe an adherence to personal ethic to be an important part of journalism. What I commend Curits (and Murrow) for is laying out his journalism as an argument and challenging viewers to consider facts and think for themselves.<br />
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This differs from much of the consumable 24/7 news networks we see today (who would have thought <i>Anchorman 2</i> would actually be poignant in this arena?). <i>Bitter Lake</i> demands its viewer critically engage with the workings of the powers at large, while, in my experience, the reporting on FoxNews or MSNBC make a business of preaching to the choir. </div>
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Curtis's self-awareness recognizes that hypothesis requires subjective interpretation, but he makes his viewers think where news networks make their viewers say “that’s what I thought!” There’s a difference between arousing passion and coming away with knowledge. <i>Bitter Lake</i> is more than just facts, but so is the process of learning.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">11. <i>When Marnie Was There</i></span></b> (d. Hiromasa Yonebayashi)<br />
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I was worried for about half of Studio Ghibli's latest (last?) feature that it wasn't going to work. It recycles the studio's tropes, both good (prepubescent female protagonist deals with real-world loss and struggles with self-actualization) and bad (the dream world leans Victorian in ethic and aesthetic despite its rural Japanese setting). <br />
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It sounds like a backhanded compliment because some of the plotting wraps up too nicely (and would have worked without it), but Ghibli on cruise control is still more affecting than any output under the Pixar banner (since Disney got their fingers in development, marketing and distribution) not named <i>Toy Story</i>. Consider the scene where Marnie, a new kid in a new town, calls an annoying, over-friendly companion a "fat pig." The film understands that much of the battle of adolescence is internal and that an important lesson on the way to adulthood is confronting what makes us monstrous in the face of real pain. <i>Inside Out</i> is fine (for a version of "Herman's Head" with no central conflict), but feels pap and canny by comparison. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">10. <i>Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter</i></span></b> (d. David Zellner)<br />
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The famous definition of insanity misattributed to Einstein goes something like this: the expectation of different results from doing the same thing over and over again.<br />
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An addendum to this adage, I spent half a workday learning, would be trying to explain <i>Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter</i> to a coworker who has never seen <i>Fargo. </i>It's a meta exercise in myth and how images become our reality. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">9. <i>Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation</i></span></b> (d. Christopher McQuarrie)<br />
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If someone told me, in 1996, that the <i>Mission: Impossible</i> franchise would extend beyond twenty years, that I would like each film more than its previous installment, and the fifth film-- helmed by a director with a scant résumé-- would be better than the previous four in a world overtaken by franchise, I would have believed it as far as I would have believed Tom Cruise would become a singular, polarizing, daunting innovator. That that film is better than the attempts by New Hollywood's Brian De Palma, the visionary John Woo, <i>Star Wars</i>-inheritor J.J. Abrams, and Pixar golden child Brad Bird is enough to find the auteur theory dismissable.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">8. <i>Ex Machina</i></span></b> (d. Alex Garland)<br />
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I feel that the majority of online film criticism appreciates genre bending over genre refining. What shocked me while leaving <i>Ex Machina</i> is its ending was predictable at the midpoint and its young director didn't give us the Kansas City shuffle. The film trusts its young talent to walk the straight and narrow (Alicia Vikander and Oscar Isaac are formidable while Domhnall Gleeson's doe-eyed milquetoast protagonist makes for sparse characterization-- it was the same problem I had with Kodi Smit-McPhee in the otherwise fine <i>Slow West</i>,<i> </i>though it works better in a movie which forces identification onto a robot), and the balance it strikes between its budget-required minimalism and its believable, unique world is remarkable.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">7. <i>Spring</i></span></b> (d. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)<br />
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A companion piece to <i>45 Years</i>, <i>Spring</i> is a tender tale of discovering monstrous betrayal in the ones we're fearlessly-- even senselessly-- devoted to and how we choose to make it work in spite of reason.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">6. <i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></span></b> (d. George Miller)<br />
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2015 is a strange year. George Miller-- a man relegated by the film industry to making animated penguin movies-- gets $150m to reboot a gonzo exploitation flick with a feminist slant. <i>Star Wars</i> does the same thing and gets largely lambasted for its unoriginality while <i>Fury Road </i>is universally acclaimed as film of the year. Strange times, indeed.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">5. <i>45 Years</i></span></b> (d. Andrew Haigh)<br />
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Edifying everything I loved about Bergman in my formative years, just give Charlotte Rampling the Oscar right now and I don't even want a discussion. More than any movie this year, its barbs stick in my craw like Stephin Merritt's "The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be."<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">4. <i>It Follows</i></span></b> (d. David Robert Mitchell)<br />
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The problem I have with Quentin Tarantino's criticism of David Robert Mitchell's gorgeous <i>It Follows</i> is that it presumes subscription to a defined horror logic. It denies the film its rich, surreal qualities and forces it into an unfair box of simple "monster film" when, like a skewed <i>When Marnie Was Here</i>, it is more a horror movie of time, of experience and of working one's way through adolescence. <br />
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Even more interesting is Tarantino naming <i>Tenebre</i> as containing his favorite movie death scene while giallo doesn't get so much as a footnote among his genre-heavy list of "Coolest Movies of All Time." Scholar Gary Neednam said "by its very nature the giallo challenges our assumptions about how non-Hollywood films should be classified, going beyond the sort of Anglo-American taxonomic imaginary that 'fixes' genre both in film criticism and the film industry in order to designate something specific."<br />
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Perhaps the subversive, genre-bending auteur is more of a traditionalist than he lets on. Judging from his tedious genre work on <i>The Hateful Eight</i>, he could take a lesson in grace and humility offered in this giallo-inspired marvel. <br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">3. <i>'71</i></span></b> (d. Yann Demange)<br />
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Pacifist Bertrand Russell famously said, "patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country." I think much of this is tied to the lack of ambiguity afforded the soldier's worldview. Yann Demange's debut feature, a harrowing historical war film played to the tune of dystopian sci-fi, abhors the monotony of the war machine but paints its horrors afresh. Nothing in the picture is black-and-white, not politics, not nationalistic or religious sympathies, but, despite soldier ethic being diametrically facile, the film most empathizes with the soldier in a murky world. It's difficult, it's timely, and it sadly got swept away from the year-end discussions. <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>2. <i>Macbeth</i></b></span> (d. Justin Kurzel)<br />
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I have poor stereotype threat test performance when it comes to Shakespeare. Throw in a few audience members audibly laughing at an ironic twist in the tragedy and I sink further into my seat even if I'm certain it's pretense. </div>
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Fortunately, Justin Kurzel brings something to the film medium the Shakespearean stage never could. The formal representation of landscape is not an expression of character psychology as much as it holds its characters hostage as pawns in nature's immovable will. That is to say, what I missed in dialogue (at least until an English subtitle aids my next viewing) was mitigated by cinematography. Lady Macbeth challenging the dominant cultural ideologies of gender politics is extra-textually aided by both the script's decision to link lineage (and the impetus of their pain) to femininity in the opening shot and a mise-en-scène of feminized imagery in a paradise lost.</div>
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It explores sex drive across gender lines as men's only nature is violence and penetration upon a cyclical, dank, tactile earth of feminized creation. The sun is regularly shrouded in cloud and fog while cinematography denies us horizon for bearings. It echoes Nicholas Winding Refn in its conjuring of Tarkovsky which is to say it instructs through image.</div>
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Visually and psychologically, versions by Welles and Polanski seem almost jejune by comparison. </div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">1. <i>Anomalisa</i></span></b> (d. Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman)</div>
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I don't mean to throw shade at Pixar, but the emotional expanse excavated in three of <i>Inside Out</i>'s competitors for Animated Feature Film (<i>Boy & the World</i>, <i>When Marnie Was Here</i> and the film of the year, <i>Anomalisa</i>) put its high-concept to shame. It's full of Charlie Kaufman's favorite specters: notably, expressing what is most true through visible, self-aware façade as if realism is a disingenuous construct. Puppets in charge of their own destiny but never free, it echoes Camus of whom essayist Tony Judt said "looked into the mirror of his own moral discomfort, disliked what he saw, and stepped aside."<br />
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<i>Anomalisa</i> features literal mirror-gazing, but there's a dread in the inescapability of freedom, of our failures to communicate what makes us most human and, for some, the malaise of Cincinnati. The film avoids convention in every aspect, but never feels quirky for the sake of spectacle. It's exactly the movie Kaufman wanted to make by, arguably, our most talented and honest sophist. It's a shame he needed Kickstarter to do it but, like a puppet in charge of his own destiny, thank God we live in a world where studio inopportunity is not the end of the line.<br />
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-88428581174428821302015-10-31T11:49:00.000-07:002017-01-03T16:23:55.911-07:0031 Days of Horror (October 2015)<b>Wednesday 30-Sep-15 at dusk</b><br />
Dr. Orloff's Invisible Monster (1970)<br />
Female Vampire (1975) <br />
<br />
<b>Thursday 1-Oct-15</b><br />
<b> </b>Severance (2006)<br />
The Tingler (1959)<br />
Curse of the Devil (1973)<br />
Breeders (1986)<br />
Breeders (1997)<br />
Maniac Cop (1988)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Friday 2-Oct-15</b><br />
Altered States (1980)<br />
The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974)<br />
The Devil Rides Out (1968)<br />
Jug Face (2013)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Chocolate (2005)<br />
<div>
<b>Saturday 3-Oct-15</b><br />
<b> </b>Abby (1974)</div>
<div>
Ganja & Hess (1973)</div>
<div>
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)</div>
<div>
Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)</div>
<div>
The Silent Scream (1979)</div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> "The Quatermass Experiment": E1 (1953)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> "The Quatermass Experiment": E2 (1953)</span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Sunday 4-Oct-15</b></div>
<div>
Whispering Corridors (1998)</div>
<div>
Whispering Corridors II: Memento Mori (1999)</div>
<div>
Alleluia (2014)</div>
<div>
Proxy (2013) </div>
<div>
Alone in the Dark (1982)</div>
<div>
Mystics in Bali (1981)</div>
<div>
Belphegor, Chapter 1 (1927)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Monday 5-Oct-15</b></div>
<div>
<b> </b>The Ghoul (1933)</div>
The Vampire Bat (1933)<br />
Lipstick (1976)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Spider and the Fly (1918)</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><br />
The Haunted Palace (1963)<br />
Blind Beast (1969)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919)</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: red;">The Fifth (2007)</span><br />
A-Haunting We Will Go (1942)<br />
Razorback (1984)<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Tuesday 6-Oct-15</b></div>
<div>
Strait-Jacket (1964)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Alice's Spooky Adventure (1924)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> If A Body Meets A Body (1945)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> </span>Howling II: ... Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) <br />
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)<br />
Quatermass 2: Enemy from Space (1957)<br />
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)<br />
Cuadecuc, vampir (1971)<br />
Manborg (2011)<br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday 7-Oct-15</b><br />
Mr. Sardonicus (1961)<br />
Barracuda (1978)<br />
Thriller - A Cruel Picture (1973)<br />
SS Experiment Love Camp (1976)<br />
The Incredible Torture Show (1976)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Spooks (1930)</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Spooks (1931) </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925) </span><br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: left; width: 168px;"><tbody>
<tr height="21" style="height: 15.75pt;"><td class="xl80" height="21" style="height: 15.75pt; width: 60pt;" width="80"><b><br /></b></td><td align="right" class="xl81" style="width: 66pt;" width="88"><b><br /></b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>Thursday 8-Oct-15</b><br />
Aswang (1994)<br />
The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)<br />
The Pit (1981)<br />
Clown (2014)<br />
Dahmer vs. Gacy (2010)<br />
The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Spook Spoofing (1928)</span><br />
The Headless Horseman (1922)<br />
<span style="color: red;"><br /></span><b>Friday 9-Oct-15</b><span style="color: red;"><span style="color: red;"><br /> </span></span>Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)<br />
The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971)<br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="color: red;"> </span></span><span style="color: red;">The Headless Horseman (1934)</span><br />
Der Student von Prag (1926)<br />
Mother Joan of the Angels (1961)<br />
Tokyo Gore Police (2008)<br />
Poltergeist (2015)<br />
Kiss of the Damned (2012)<br />
Genuine (1920)<br />
<br />
<b>Saturday 10-Oct-15</b><br />
Leprechaun (1993)<br />
Leprechaun 2 (1994)<br />
Leprechaun 3 (1995)<br />
Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996)<br />
Leprechaun In the Hood (2000)<br />
Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood (2003)<br />
Leprechaun: Origins (2014)<br />
Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare (1987)<br />
<br />
<b>Sunday 11-Oct-15</b><br />
Santo contra los zombies (1962)<br />
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)<br />
Creep (2014)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Dance of the Dead (2005)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Sick Girl (2006)<br />
Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)<br />
<br />
<b>Monday 12-Oct-15</b><br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span>The Dunwich Horror (1970)<br />
The Voices (2015)<br />
The Monster Walks (1932)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> Felix the Ghost Breaker (1923)</span><br />
In A Glass Cage (1986)<br />
Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver (2011)<br />
Gingerdead Man Vs. Evil Bong (2013)<br />
<br />
<b>Tuesday 13-Oct-15 </b><br />
X (1963)<br />
The Man from Planet X (1951)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Broom-Stick Bunny (1956)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">Skeleton Frolics (1937)</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><br />
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992)<br />
From the Dark (2014)<br />
Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)<br />
Belphegor: Chapter 2 (1927)<br />
<span style="color: red;">The Haunted Mouse (1941)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Archie Show: Groovy Ghosts (1968) </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Hide and Shriek (1938)</span> <br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday 14-Oct-15</b><br />
What We Do In The Shadows (2014)<br />
Frankenstein's Army (2013)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span>Satan Triumphant: Part 1 (1917)<span style="color: red;"><br /> Satan Triumphant: Part 2 (1917)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">Spook Louder (1943)</span><br />
Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl (2009)<br />
No Telling (1991)<br />
My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002)<br />
<br />
<b>Thursday 15-Oct-15</b><br />
Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015)<br />
Zombeavers (2014)<br />
Drive In Massacre (1977)<br />
Silver Bullets (2011)<br />
Kibakichi (2004)<br />
WolfCop (2014)<br />
<br />
<b>Friday 16-Oct-15</b><br />
Digging Up the Marrow (2014)<br />
Darkness Falls (2003)<br />
A Warning to the Curious (1972)<br />
Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949)<br />
Crimson Peak (2015)<br />
Goosebumps (2015)<br />
The Stalls of Barchester (1971)<br />
"Night Gallery": Make Me Laugh / Clean Kills and Other Trophies (1971)<br />
<br />
<b>Saturday 17-Oct-15</b><br />
Howl of the Devil (1987)<br />
Race With the Devil (1975)<br />
Here Comes the Devil (2012)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> Faust in Hell (1903)</span><br />
The Witches (1990)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span>Tales of Halloween (2015)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Homecoming (2005)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span> Homunculus, Part 4: Revenge of the Homunculus (1916)<span style="color: red;"><br /> </span><br />
<b>Sunday 18-Oct-15</b><span style="color: red;"><span style="color: red;"><br /> </span></span>Lunacy (2005)<br />
The Cars that Ate Paris (1974)<br />
Frightmare (1974)<br />
La torre de los siete jorobados (1944)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Pick Me Up (2006)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Homunculus, Part 2 (9 min. fragment) (1916)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912)</span><br />
<br />
<b>Monday 19-Oct-15</b><br />
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (2005)<br />
Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Bedfellows (2008)</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Meat (2012) </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Treevenge (2008) </span> <br />
More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead (2011)<br />
Visitor Q (2001)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Mad Doctor (1933)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Trick or Treat (1952)</span><br />
Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)<br />
<br />
<b>Tuesday 20-Oct-15</b><br />
I Married A Monster From Outer Space (1958)<br />
Gothic (1986)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> "Dead Set": E2 (2008)<br /> "Dead Set": E3 (2008)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">Teddy: It's Gonna Be a Bear (2011)</span><br />
The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)<br />
Unfriended (2015)<br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday 21-Oct-15</b><br />
<span style="color: red;"></span>Cursed (2005)<br />
The Horde (2009)<br />
Arrebato (1979)<br />
Naked Girl Killed in the Park (1972)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Haeckel's Tale (2006)<br />
Don't Open the Door! (1974)<br />
<br />
<b>Thursday 22-Oct-15</b><br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span>Stake Land (2010)<br />
The Addiction (1995)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> "</span><span style="color: red;">Dead Set": E4 (2008)<br /> "Dead Set": E5 (2008)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span>Kuroneko (1968)<br />
Long Weekend (1978)<br />
<br />
<b>Friday 23-Oct-15</b> <br />
Honeymoon (2014)<br />
Ghosts on the Loose (1943)<br />
The Curse of the Wraydons (1946)<br />
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Deer Woman (2005) <br />
<span style="color: red;"> "Darknet": S1E2 (2013)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Hot Scots (1948)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Hair-Raising Hare (1946)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Lights Out (2013)</span><br />
<br />
<b>Saturday 24-Oct-15</b><br />
Granny (1999)<br />
Santo contra hombres infernales (1961)<br />
Awakening of the Beast (1970)<br />
Countess Dracula (1971)<br />
Q (1982)<br />
Vampyres (1974)<br />
<br />
<b>Sunday 25-Oct-15</b> <br />
Schloß Vogeloed (1921)<br />
The Bloody Judge (1970)<br />
The Cremator (1969)<br />
The Butterfly Murders (1979)<br />
Blood and Roses (1960)<br />
Baxter (1989)<br />
<br />
<b>Monday 26-Oct-15</b><br />
Queen of Earth (2015)<br />
The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> Grimes - "Flesh Without Blood/Live in the Wild Dream" (2015)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;">We Want Our Mummy (1939)</span><br />
The Gift (2015)<br />
Pay the Ghost (2015)<br />
Nekromantik (1987)<br />
<span style="color: red;">Shivering Sherlocks (1948)</span><span style="color: red;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Spooky Hooky (1936) </span> <span style="color: red;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span> "Fear the Walking Dead": So Close, Yet So Far (2015)<span style="color: red;"><span style="color: red;"><br /> </span></span><br />
<b>Tuesday 27-Oct-15 </b> <br />
Outrage (1950)<br />
The Queen of Spades (1949)<br />
The Return of Daimajin (1966)<br />
The Wrath of Daimajin (1966)<br />
These Are the Damned (1963)<br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday 28-Oct-15</b><br />
Stage Fright (2014)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> Pilooski feat. Jarvis Cocker: "Completely Sun" (2015) </span><br />
Krabat: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1978)<br />
The Purge: Anarchy (2014)<br />
Belphegor, Chapter 3 (1927)<br />
<br />
<b>Thursday 29-Oct-15</b><br />
The Lazarus Effect (2015)<br />
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)<br />
"Masters of Horror": Dreams in the Witch-House (2005)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> The Haunted House (1929) </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Claws for Alarm (1954) </span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Scrappy's Ghost Story (1935)</span><br />
"Fear the Walking Dead": The Dog (2015)<br />
"Fear the Walking Dead": Not Fade Away (2015)<br />
"Fear the Walking Dead": Cobalt (2015)<br />
<br />
<b>Friday 30-Oct-15</b><br />
Pontypool (2008)<br />
Panna a netvor (1978)<br />
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)<br />
Angst (1983)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> Ghost Wanted (1940)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Too Many Cooks (2014)</span><br />
<span style="color: red;"> Thriller (1983)</span><br />
Vampire Hunter D (1985)<br />
Critters 4 (1992)<br />
"Fear the Walking Dead": The Good Man (2015)<br />
Belphegor, Chapter 4 (1927)<br />
<br />
<b>Saturday 31-Oct-15</b> <span style="color: red;"><br /> </span>Bone Tomahawk (2015)<br />
Psychomania (1973)<br />
<span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: red;">Monsters Crash the Pajama Party (1965)</span><br />
100 Monsters (1968)<br />
Belladonna of Sadness (1973)<br />
The Monster Squad (1987)<br />
"Masters of Horror": The Fair-Haired Child (2006)<br />
WNUF Halloween Special (2013)</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-65029711537548343752015-08-13T13:00:00.001-07:002015-08-13T13:10:16.068-07:00Landscape as Counter-Cultural Ideology in Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Valhalla Rising<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Before there is character in Werner Herzog’s 1972 art-house film <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> or Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2009 metatextual adventure film <i>Valhalla Rising</i>—despite being eponymously-titled character studies—there is landscape. While this may not appear divergent to cinematic history’s tradition of the establishing shot, the diegetic worlds which precede man in these films act as authorial narrative commentary.<br />
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David Bordwell speaks of the subjective nature of the art-house film’s use of landscape saying, “surroundings may be construed as the projections of a character's mind. Similarly, the syuzhet may use psychology to justify the manipulation of time,” but Herzog and Refn invert these conventions: rather than using character psychology to expressively “shape spatial representation,” the weightiness of the formal representation of landscape in these films paints its characters as pawns to nature’s indifferent and immovable will <i>(Narration in</i> 209). </div>
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Landscape, then, becomes a character through its formal representation. The vulgarity of nature is juxtaposed against the violence of civilized man (in the name of religion) as a philosophical, authoritarian response to the marriage of colonialization and mythology. True to art-house convention, each film ties historical colonialization to a social critique of its respective history of cultures prevailing over other cultures. Herzog’s <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> and Refn’s <i>Valhalla Rising</i> juxtapose unforgiving landscape against religious colonization as a social indictment against cultural violence and the Western inability for communal mythology.<br />
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Though handled as a metaphoric and mythological figure within Herzog’s film, Lope de Aguirre cannot be divided from his historic significance as Spanish evangelical conquistador: the product of an ideology which justified its abuse of the New World in the name of God. <br />
<a name='more'></a>Spain’s King Ferdinand issued a decree in 1512 which “expressly invoked the papal donation as it ordered the ‘idolatrous Indians’ to acknowledge ‘the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world’” (Anaya 36). That is to say, Lope de Aguirre’s expedition in Peru four decades later presupposes holy and political sovereignty. The allegorization of Lope de Aguirre as political commentary on the rise of Nazism in Herzog’s own post-World War II Germany is certainly authorial but not singular. Herzog’s formal use of editing, cinematography and mise-en-scène within <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> presents its landscape as a philosophical worldview of which the rise of Nazism is a symptom.<br />
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The opening sequence of <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> slyly alludes to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, <i>The Triumph of the Will</i> as each film presents its narrative as the beginning of a new empire through documentary-style text before the omniscient camera. Shooting from a high-angle, each film descends through the clouds onto a marching military as on a mission from God. Yet Herzog’s use of landscape subverts Riefenstahl’s intended montage. </div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijLvI33vhssndF-Mhev8OQO53P2ieXwmh3Pq_XlyvwJAzIR56wJgmVg2YYFn4XmMvrhXeWtgI_LDFqrrBrauGQnJTocwJhtWZ3UtRj_BaChi6rEfzXa42iivocXvmv-J2dCjNLpf8F7x8/s1600/aguirre-triumph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijLvI33vhssndF-Mhev8OQO53P2ieXwmh3Pq_XlyvwJAzIR56wJgmVg2YYFn4XmMvrhXeWtgI_LDFqrrBrauGQnJTocwJhtWZ3UtRj_BaChi6rEfzXa42iivocXvmv-J2dCjNLpf8F7x8/s640/aguirre-triumph.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Omniscient descent through the clouds in the opening sequences of <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> (left) and <i>Triumph of the Will</i> (right)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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In their critique of different cultural representations of Lope de Aguirre, Kirschner and Manchón connect the formal similarities between these two films, coming to the conclusion that, “a ciertas facciones de la historiografía alemana de la postguerra que conciben el fenómeno nazi como cataclismo natural en vez de catástrofe netamente humana de una magnitud incomentable” (“certain factions of the German historiography of the postwar Nazi phenomenon are conceived as natural disaster rather than purely human catastrophe of unspeakable magnitude” [author’s translation]) (Kirschner 414). This analysis relies, perhaps, too heavily on the Nazi metaphor and not heavily enough on the formal aspects of Herzog’s depiction of landscape which renders civilization impotent by comparison not consequence.<br />
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As the caravan of Spanish conquistadors and Indian slaves descend the Andes in the opening sequence, the extended take in extreme long shot doesn’t distinguish by race or class. They maneuver through the unforgiving terrain as one—an inconsequential string of ants—and it isn’t until the camera moves in to medium shot that petty coercion of civilization takes place: a cannon appears incongruous; a horse falls over igniting munitions; Ursúa’s mistress, Doña Inéz peers through an elaborately draped window on a makeshift raft. </div>
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The mise-en-scène of Old World luxuries holds no value in the landscape of the New World. The narrow worldview of the conquistadors refuses their adaptation in a world of natural selection. Nature, through Herzog’s direction and Thomas Mauch’s cinematography, appears adamantly unchanged by and incomprehensible to the will of the Old World’s torchbearers. Jump cuts at varying focal lengths of the Amazon River—some of which blurry—suggest character (psychological and physical) disorientation just as extended takes of river landscape evoke madness. However, the formal variations don’t offer the audience a subjective viewpoint into the heads of the characters (their Old World actions and reason act as a psychological wedge, distancing them from the viewer) so much as they anthropomorphize nature.<br />
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Although the conquistadors are aware of their demise (“we’re all going to die” a character forebodes even before the film’s inciting incident), they steadfastly attempt to tame the New World with old logic. The camera breaks the 180-degree rule as they first board their rafts, and again when Aguirre, succumbed to madness on a raft of monkeys, is the lone survivor. On the surface, the deliberate editorial faux pas suggests character disorientation to contrast the film’s motif of the faulty hubris of linear logic (Aguirre promises, “whoever follows me and the river will win untold riches”; Don Fernando de Guzman boasts, “every day we drift makes [our new country] bigger”; and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal bastardizes Christ’s “lilies of the field” speech promising, “Thou lettest man flow on like a river, and Thy years know no end”), but the montage doesn’t suggest that the conquistadors can’t find their bearing so much as the landscape suggests there are no bearings to be found. </div>
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The conquistadors respond to indifferent landscape not by adaptation, but by enforcing outdated law. Aguirre argues, “Because of our mutiny, we must make our position legal,” before conducting a trial in the rainforest. In the face of the New World, bureaucracy is delirium. When the film ends with Aguirre trapped in a whirlpool, the camera takes away character subjectivity and, in an extended take, surrounds the raft with a 360-degree pan. In his madness, Aguirre has learned the fault of his linear logic and fretfully declares, “we are drifting in circles!” Nature has no interest in cultural assimilation and the film’s formal tendencies portend the party’s demise.<br />
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If cinematography displays character blindness to surroundings figuratively, the film’s sound suggests their deafness literally. When one of the initial rafts gets trapped in a whirlpool, the screams of its boarders are completely cut off under the shroud of nightfall despite their close proximity to the men on the opposite bank. Aguirre responds to man’s horrified silence in the face of nature by ordering his men to fire the cannon despite a lack of target. </div>
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Later, he demands an Indian slave play a traditional pan flute in a time of turmoil for no pragmatic purpose. Landscape chokes out the voice of civilized man and Aguirre has little recourse. Herzog also ties religion to his motif of sound as religious colonialization quite literally falls on deaf ears. Aguirre’s evangelism is a combination of hubris and Nietzschean construct. He urges a monk, “do not forget to pray, lest God’s end will be uncomely” as if Spanish rule eclipses God’s self-sustainability. Later he preaches, “If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble.” Aguirre commands nature’s subordination and is astonished when all he knows of civilization is futile. <br />
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Herzog’s use of metaphor and mise-en-scène predicts this futility of colonialism long before Aguirre’s awakening. The cannon the conquistadors wield is a symbol of both power and Christian fertility but, in the backdrop of the Amazon rainforest, it becomes a Sisyphean burden. The film reminds us at the beginning that “the Word of God must be brought to the pagans,” a credence reiterated by Carvajal near his journey’s end when he says, “Let’s not forget the most important part of our mission: to spread the Word of God to the savages.” Yet the fraudulent affectation of the Spanish Requerimeinto is exposed when an Indian holds a Bible up to his ear—expecting to hear the Word—only to be met with both silence from God and spiritual indifference from the ascetic.<br />
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Perhaps history, too, is what falls on deaf ears in reading <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God </i>as social critique. The directors of New German Cinema challenged societal and political order. Not only did the new auteurs (of which Herzog was a charter member, having signed the <i>Oberhausen Manifesto</i>) rebel against the torpor of post-war German cinema’s narrative, formal, and economic sensibilities, opposition to Germany’s political climate found dissatisfaction with the stagnation of social change. </div>
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The post-war population found “the toleration of ex-Nazis in prominent positions difficult to accept. This opposition movement was of course not confined to Germany; …protests swept across Europe and America, opposing in particular America’s involvement in Vietnam” (Knight 39). David Melbye argues that this cultural unrest and post-war nihilism played out in art-cinema’s landscape and formal variation; a “defeatism reflected a growing disillusion with traditional Christian beliefs, political attitudes toward ‘Third World’ nations, as well as modern society’s investment in technological advancement” (Melbye 6). If we refer back to the Riefenstahl allusion through this cultural refraction, landscape takes on a different historical meaning. The informational text prologue in <i>The Triumph of the Will</i> reads: <br />
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20 years after the outbreak of the World War, 16 years after the start of German suffering, 19 months after the start of Germany’s rebirth, Adolf Hitler flew once again to Nuremberg to hold a military display.</blockquote>
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Compare this to the superimposed titles which precede the narrative in <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> which read: <br />
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After the conquest and plundering of the Inca Empire by Spain, the Indians invented the legend of El Dorado, a land of gold, located in the swamps of the Amazon headwaters. A large expedition of Spanish adventurers, led by Gonzalo Pizzaro, set off from the Peruvian highlands in late 1560.</blockquote>
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The textual allusion suggests Herzog’s Lope de Aguirre is a picture of Hitler (who was, in turn, a picture of the historical Lope de Aguirre): the two each lead a maniacal, ill-fated conquest in the name of nationalism and eugenics, and a god-like descent from the clouds begins their unfulfilled quests. A heavy irony is at play in the Aguirre text; what at first seems a reversal of fortunes (Riefenstahl’s propaganda piece promises a Phoenician rise from the ashes while Herzog presupposes failure), the textual prologue comments not only on the inevitable fall of Nazism, but of the current state of affairs. A 1965 version of the Riefenstahl prologue could read, “20 years after the end of the Second World War, 16 years after the formation of the FRG, former Nazi Kurt Georg Kiesinger is elected to Hitler’s former position of Chancellor after a brief stint with the Christian Democratic Union.” A history of savage cultural violence continues in the name of the Lord.</div>
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This is why the landscape in <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> knows nothing of the Christian faith: the marriage of Christianity, colonialism and technological hubris reappear in First World politics in the age of the New German Cinema. And like the futile attempt by the conquistadors to hoist their cannon from the mud—and the secondary regard for human life in Carvajal’s lip service to his comrades’ “souls [resting] much better in consecrated ground”—shades of neocolonialism (Françafrique, the Belgian Congo, U.S. occupation in Vietnam) sprouted up despite the 600-year history of colonialism coming to an end. The earth is in a battle with human civilization in Herzog’s philosophy (generally) and in <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> (specifically), but their relationship isn’t dichotomous. </div>
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Herzog, himself, deplores the vulgarity of nature in his <i>Fitzcarraldo</i> production journal writing, “The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin” (<i>Conquest</i> 105). That is to say, from the other side of the prism, landscape disacknowledges man’s moral constructs. That’s why beauty coexists with the treacherous in <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i>: a butterfly lands on the finger of an Indian slave as bodies starve on a raft; a flowering tree thrives despite floodwaters rising deep into the jungle. At the height of Aguirre’s madness, an extended take captures the glistening sun reflecting off the surface of the river; El Dorado was there all along. </div>
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The ways of the Old World expire with Aguirre’s men at the end of 1560 (as Hitler’s madness grew desperate at the close of 1944). The new year brings the promise of a New World, indifferent to the former’s antiquated logic. Herzog’s authorial imploration warns that, contrary to Aguirre’s concept of progress, it is human civilization’s barbarism which is cyclical. Detached, nature marches on. <br />
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Nicolas Winding Refn, a 21st-Century auteur, exemplifies David Bordwell’s insight that “the condition of belatedness is probably most visible in our movies’ constant allusionism,” but <i>Valhalla Rising</i>, deliberately Refn’s most challenging work, digests its influences to recontextualize Herzog’s juxtaposition of landscape and power (<i>The Way</i> 24). As <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> references <i>The Triumph of the Will</i> as the fall is predicated in Hitler’s mythic rise, the titular “rising” in Refn’s work references the mythology in experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s <i>Magick Lantern Cycle</i>.</div>
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<i>Valhalla Rising</i>’s protagonist, the neither heroic nor anti-heroic One Eye, is ascribed the same moral ambiguity as Anger’s Lucifer in <i>Lucifer Rising</i>. Lucifer represents not, in the Anger text, the binary opposition to the Christian God, but a prefiguring of the Aeon of Horus, a mythical concept in the counter-cultural religion of Thelema founded by famed occultist Aleister Crowley. Here, self-actualization replaces civilization’s previous colonial epoch in which “the Universe was imagined as catastrophic; love, death, resurrection, as the method by which experience was built up; this corresponds to patriarchal systems” (Crowley 16). The vilification of Crowley’s philosophy by the dominant, binary Christian culture speaks more about the truth of this statement than Crowley’s own esoteric dogma; Anger crowns Lucifer—the lord of light—as an autonomous myth and christens him through the medium of light, “[Anger’s] camera a ceremonial instrument of invocation” (Brottman 6). <br />
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Just as landscape in <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> and Lucifer in <i>Lucifer Rising</i> refuse to be categorized in the Christian/heathen dichotomy, One Eye—neither pagan or Christian in a binary world—is the product of new myth combining “a divine portent that reveals the will or judgment of God or the gods” (Vican 157). The wrath of God. Refn alludes to both Herzog’s and Anger’s imagery throughout <i>Valhalla Rising</i> not as mere accolade but in defiance of neocolonial hegemony choking out filmic mythmaking. </div>
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Jarring, discontinuous edits into One Eye’s hallucinatory premonitions are stylized, presenting a mirrored double-image of One Eye (reminiscent of Anger’s <i>Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome</i>) colored a non-diegetic red (as in Anger’s stylistic function of casting red light onto characters faces in <i>Lucifer Rising</i>). Yet, these monstrous dreams are the only correct forethought in the narrative suggesting truth is found outside the established myth. One Eye’s muteness, like his monocular vision, hearkens to Herzog’s use of silence and is not treated as lack: the film’s sparse dialogue paints those who speak as philosophically adrift (in the land of the blind…). The myth of One Eye empowers the weak on a narrative level and his incongruous presence in the colonial world is mirrored by the film’s formal presentation of him. <br />
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Unlike Lope de Aguirre, One Eye is an extension of his landscape. The prologue of superimposed text reads, “In the beginning there was only man and nature,” and One Eye precedes the wrongheadedness of both pagan and colonial tracks. The film opens with the same mountainous clouds as <i>Aguirre</i>, but One Eye is a slave inside a cage much like the one in which Aguirre imprisons his detractors. The Nordic world of <i>Valhalla Rising</i> is imposing and wary: any distance is obscured by mist and cinematography denies us any horizon for bearings. Further disconcerting, the combination of mist and (presumed) northerly latitude prevents true nightfall; time, like space, is disorienting as shades of diffused grey are all that separates day from night in their surreal world.</div>
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Physical disorientation becomes a narrative device as One Eye boards a ship of Vikings en route to the Holy Land. The fog intensifies such that water and air are indistinguishable from one another and the camera pans 360-degrees capturing the claustrophobia of the entire ship. Nature creates a Beckettian void as the voyagers are trapped in a fog with no wind, no current, and no concept of time. Refn robs his characters of the journaling plot device in <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i>; Herzog’s conquistadors measure out their demise daily, Refn’s Vikings are unsure of their very existence on their voyage to the New World.<br />
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If religion plays like a condoning afterthought for colonial violence in <i>Aguirre</i>, the sincere devotion of the Vikings in <i>Valhalla Rising</i> is all the more frightening. They view their misfortune on the open water as a curse which must be rectified biblically. Inferring both Jonah’s defiant trip to Tarshish and young Isaac on Mount Moriah, the Vikings turn to One Eye’s mouthpiece, a young pagan boy, with intent to throw him overboard. </div>
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Violence perpetrated by the Christians is connected, in worldview, to the violence of the pagans. When One Eye overpowers a ravenous chieftain and slave owner, the pagan man warns before his disembowelment, “When I die, you will go back to hell.” For the pagan in <i>Valhalla Rising</i>, the end of one’s corporeality is the end of all existence. The Christians counter with startling violence, single-minded in its monotheistic resolve, to convince surviving pagans of the error of their theology. Worldview is negotiated through cruelty as the Viking crusaders leave newly conquered pagan women to huddle, naked and shivering, in an unforgiving landscape warmed only by a burning pyre of their men. <br />
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This cruelty holds little currency in the New World as landscape represents, just as it does in <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i>, the unknown. As in <i>Aguirre</i>, primitive arrows strike sailing Vikings from an unseen assailant as if their enemy was an anthropomorphized earth. The film suggests the Christian tenet of subduing the earth only ever translated to human oppression; their successful brutality against the Nordic pagans stands in stark contrast to their empty religious symbols in the New World. “God brought us out of that mist for a reason. We claim this land in His name,” orders The General, approaching Aguirrian madness. “How do we do that?” replies one of his warriors, “We’re half-starved, three men dead, one missing.” </div>
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The dialogue-free, highly-stylized and discontinuous slow-motion sequence that follows depicts how these lost souls try to spiritually subdue the earth which they don’t realize has immobilized them. The cinematography of landscape in close-up rather than long shot psychologically allegorizes indifferent spiritual void rather than its usual role of proportional chastening. One Viking kneels at the water to pray, but his only answer is his shadowed face staring back at him; another meditates upon his own death as he stares into the impenetrable woods. The more savage members of the warband try to anthropomorphize their “man vs. nature” demise through Old World violence and penetration. </div>
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One Viking claws at the muddy soil, succumbing to the realization that his grasp can’t contain something simultaneously grand and amorphous; another stabs at the surface of the water with two daggers—as if in face-to-face battle with the other realm—before floating lifeless, face down, in a crucifix position. A third transposes his violence onto a victim he knows he can conquer, overpowering a weaker warrior, raping him and forcing his face into the consuming mud. <br />
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One Eye, the film’s intercessor between nature and civilization, accepts his demise and his spiritual act in this sequence is one of respect. One Eye constructs a rock cairn—not without struggle, for the earth refuses to be subdued and the cairn topples multiple times—which foreshadows his personal sacrifice in memorial as well as it signifies his distinction from Christian myth. Just as the stone cairn can represent ceremonial, commemorative and spiritual connection between earth and man in ancient Native American cultures, One Eye recognizes upon his entrance into the New World the error of his compatriots’ philosophy of subjugation. In a sequence rife with violent phallic imagery, the cairn is the one instance which suggests the fertility of a myth devoid of Christian influence. Landscape is beguiling in the New World because the Vikings entered it pretextually. <br />
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Refn’s use of landscape, then, plays a role of dual evocation. <i>Valhalla Rising</i> wears its influences on its sleeve for, in addition to the aforementioned allusion to <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> and the films of Kenneth Anger, Refn also references Jodorowsky’s <i>El Topo</i> and Tarkovsky’s <i>Stalker</i> as the film’s spiritual predecessors (“Valhalla Rising”). Both of these films present barren, yet timeless, landscapes which allegorize the failure of imperialist zeitgeist (the lifeless Mexican desert bemoans Spanish colonialism in the former, Estonian wasteland lies in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s communist gulags in the latter). Yet, despite the landscape allusion Refn employs, <i>Valhalla Rising</i> is distinct much like <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i>—in that his New World is inhospitable but never barren. Stranger still, the Vikings intended to set sail for Jerusalem, a landscape of scorching sun and hostile desert. Perhaps Refn is suggesting, through his use of landscape and allusion to films of allegorical wasteland, spent earth is what colonialists desire because it is the natural outcome of their theology. </div>
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One Eye carries The Boy on his back up a mountain (again referencing <i>El Topo</i>) to sacrifice. But unlike the biblical account of Abraham and Isaac, it is One Eye who sacrifices himself to save The Boy from the sins of the Vikings. This inversion of Christian myth through use of film allusion complements Refn’s philosophy in regard to the film’s landscape. Refn says, “I became obsessed with this kind of remoteness and how far could I go into the mountains,” and the film feels otherworldly despite its earthly theme (Indrisek). The landscape is both virginal and foreboding, historically and cinematographically. The unblemished Scottish locale is home to both the scenes of Christian encroachment upon the Norse pagans and to the North America which, the film extrapolates, the same crusaders commit genocide against indigenous peoples. We know the ideology will begat a wasteland but, here, it is anew: One Eye’s sacrifice creates an alternate history which suggests new myth while its purity of landscape amid recontextualized allusion suggests film is the new cultural mythmaking.</div>
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Herzog’s treatment of Lope de Aguirre as mad hero in a traditionally antiheroic tale and Refn’s inversion of biblical symbols aren’t a subversion of colonial myth but of mythmaking. <i>Aguirre, The Wrath of God</i> and <i>Valhalla Rising</i> both explore the failure of colonization to force cultural assimilation on the New World. The ideological antiquity of the conquistadors and Vikings may suggest that paternalistic human nature is cyclical, but it is these historical victors who lose in the narratives. The ideology of imperialism stunts cultural mythmaking, forcing human history to tumble through similar cycles of brutality; Herzog and Refn suggest film is an antidote. </div>
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These films avoid a defeatist attitude because the very process of filmmaking establishes a language of new cultural ideologies. The conventions of art-cinema employed by Herzog and Refn (intertextual allusion, discontinuity editing, the self-reflexivity of breaking the fourth wall) suggest that film is the new cultural myth. Herzog has repeatedly declared, with only minimal facetiousness, “Film … is not the art of scholars but of illiterates,” which isn’t far from equating the ivory tower of academic elitism with paternalism and barbarism (<i>Herzog On</i> 70). The new myths of our cinema will not be forced ideologies marched down the Andes. They are, like our history, pastiche of stolen and reappropriated images, egalitarian in tone. Landscape in these films mirrors the landscape of cinema: unfettered, rife with possibility, and dangerous when subdued. Communal mythology is rewritten through film; the New World is not conquered, but inexhaustible. <br />
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<u>Works Cited</u><br />
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Anaya, S. James. <i>Indigenous Peoples in International Law</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.<br />
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Bordwell, David. <i>Narration in the Fiction Film</i>. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.<br />
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Bordwell, David. <i>The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies</i>. Bekeley: University of California Press, 2006.<br />
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Brottman, Mikita. “Force and Fire.” <i>Moonchild: The Films of Kenneth Anger</i>. Ed. Jack Hunter. London: Creation Books, 2002. 5-10.<br />
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Crowley, Aleister and Rose Edith Crowley. <i>The Book of the Law: Liber Al Vel Legis</i>. 1904. Reprint. Boston: Red Wheel Weiser, 2004.<br />
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Herzog, Werner. <i>Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of</i> Fitzcarraldo. Trans. Krishna Winston. New York: Ecco, 2009.<br />
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Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. <i>Herzog on Herzog</i>. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.<br />
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Indrisek, Scott. “‘Valhalla Rising’: A Q&A with Filmmaker Nicolas Refn.” <i>BlouinArtInfo</i>. Louise Blouin Media, 2010. Web. 18 Jun. 2015. <br />
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Kirschner, Teresa J. and Enrique Manchón. “Lope de Aguirre como signo politico polivalente.” <i>Revista canadiense de studios hispànicos</i> 18.3 (1994): 405-416.<br />
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Knight, Julia. <i>Women and the New German Cinema</i>. London: Verso. 1992.<br />
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Melbye, David. <i>Landscape Allegory in Cinema: From Wilderness to Wasteland</i>. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.<br />
<br />
“Valhalla Rising: The Making-Of” (supplementary material on DVD release of <i>Valhalla Rising</i>). 2009. DVD. MPI Media Group, 2010.<br />
<br />
Vican, Justin. <i>Nicolas Winding Refn and the Violence of Art: A Critical Study of the Films</i>. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2014.</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-42048281124501889152015-07-04T00:37:00.000-07:002015-07-04T01:01:09.344-07:00Mookie and the Right ThingSpike Lee may "privilege morality over politics" as Douglas Kellner argues in "Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in the Films of Spike Lee," but morality is far from black and white in <i>Do The Right Thing</i>. Neither morality, politics or racism is given an easy solution because, Lee would argue, there isn't one. Radio Raheem, in adopting the "love/hate" speech from <i>The Night of the Hunter</i> portrays a worldview that isn't exactly cut and dry (let's not forget Rev. Powell is one of the greatest cinematic villains of all time). He ends his speech saying, "if I love you, I love you. But if I hate you..." and never finishes the thought. <i>Do the Right Thing</i> may be a postmodern morality play, but Mookie is an everyman character: he doesn't know how to respond in this exchange with Radio Raheem saying only, "well, there you have it: love and hate," baffled by Radio Raheem's rant.<br />
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Radio Raheem seems to be purporting the MLK philosophy that love can conquer societal hate, and this thought it what Mookie has a difficult time reconciling after Radio Raheem's death. Mookie throws the trash can through the window of Sal's Famous, and I don't believe it has anything to do with protecting Sal's family. Mookie screams "HATE!" as he hurls that can and, with the act, completes the ellipses of Radio Raheem's statement. Kellner seems to criticize Lee for failing to spell how how "a system of exploitation oppresses Black," as if racism were that clear-cut. </div>
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Mookie throws that trash can because of this system, but also because of how this system affects the individual. In the moment, Sal's Famous represented another white establishment entering the Black community for economic gain despite harboring racist attitudes toward the very community it exploits. No, Sal was not directly responsible for the death of Radio Raheem, but these actions all occurred through a thread of hate. Sal hating the Black community he served is only a step (through the narrative) of the police officers' disregard for Black lives. Mookie's destruction of property changes the conversation, trying to get the community to "wake up" (like the moral of <i>School Daze</i>) to the system of hate in their community. </div>
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As we have seen recently in Ferguson and Baltimore, America still gets very hung up on the destruction of private property and neglectful of human lives. Mookie did the right thing, not in the act itself, but in forcing the conversation to be one about the larger community issues and systematic racism rather than eye-for-an-eye violence. It is not surprising to me that many people still don't understand why Mookie did what he did when we can turn on the news and, instead of hearing outrage over the death of Freddie Gray, presidential candidates instead Tweet "Blatant and rampant property destruction in Baltimore as the police stand by and watch. Should be a lesson on how NOT to handle riots. SAD!"</div>
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And it is sad in <i>Do the Right Thing</i>, too. Mookie and Sal's morning after is not a time of rejoicing, but they come to a sort of ambiguous understanding: Sal tries to play the martyr, bemoaning the store he built with his "bare hands." Mookie's response to what that means is, "it means you owe me $250." That is to say, private enterprise doesn't trump social responsibility. Sal has a debt to the Black community he serves.</div>
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Mookie wasn't deliberately directing attention away from Sal and his sons in order to protect them. When the conflict arises, Mookie is standing alongside Sal and his sons while the community looks at them with disdain. This is where Mookie trades sides in disassociation. This is partially self-preservation, but more important, it is Mookie's decision to take a very political stance. <br />
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Mookie seems like the kind of character who would let Sal hear about it if he was acting heroically in order to save Sal's family. When the two discuss the night's events the next morning, Sal accuses Mookie of ruining the place and Mookie says nothing like "you should be thanking me for saving your ass out there" and, furthermore, Sal doesn't interpret Mookie as doing anything other than escalating the situation. He blames Mookie for the window whose response is "motherfuck the window. Radio Raheem is dead." These few words say everything about Mookie's intentions. Mookie may not have participated in any violence directed at Sal and his sons (I don't think most of the characters in the film would have, I don't think many of the protestors in Baltimore today would have), but it's difficult to read his actions in the scene as deliberately deflecting attention away from Sal. </div>
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Furthermore, it isn't clear Spike Lee is concerned with dichotomous morality in the situation. Love/hate are presented like Martin/Malcolm: neither has all the answers. Mookie's actions suggest that the philosophies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X are only ethereal until you're forced into a real-world situation. Their photos burning together inside Sal's Famous isn't so much to say that their philosophies are antiquated, but that we need to <i>act</i> rather than merely pontificate. The film challenges us to <i>do</i>, not buy a photo or subscribe to a given ideology. Our goal should be a common one and there isn't a prescribed road to attain it. By "doing a thing" in the name of fighting against a disenfranchising system and by opening social eyes to lives mattering more than property, Mookie did do the right thing. He acted.<br />
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Mookie didn't do the best "relative" or "situational" thing. Yes, <i>Do the Right Thing</i> is a postmodern work and, undoubtedly, a nihilist fog surrounds the community in terms of dealing with systematic racism, but Lee lack of clear-cut answers doesn't suggest he thinks morality is relative. The title of the film is a call to action and not one to be taken ironically. Sal's Famous was a symbol, but also a real place. Radio Raheem was not a symbol, he was a human life. Doing the right thing is not a matter of ineffable philosophy (no matter the good intentions behind King or Malcolm X), it's a matter of taking action in the real world against injustice.<br />
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The film may not be overtly political (in the binary sense), but it's important to note that it ends with Mister Senor Love Daddy saying the city's Mayor will get to the bottom of the dispute because "the city of New York will not let property be destroyed by anyone." Radio Raheem is not in the news or the purview of the city. Black lives do not matter here. That's why the Love Daddy follows the news by encouraging people to register to vote. The system is broken, it disenfranchises Black, and, despite Kellner's essay, that is a very political message. It would not be nearly as powerful if Lee gave a trite explanation as to how to solve the nation's racist ills. Spike Lee doesn't provide political answers to solving the race problem because its solution is beyond the realm of politics and he doesn't see the end of racism occurring in his lifetime. I tend to agree on both accounts.</div>
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-17150214496135250892015-07-03T23:21:00.000-07:002015-08-13T13:11:31.738-07:00Cinematography as Romantic Catalyst in Woody Allen's Manhattan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Of the many great eras of American film, the 1970s, are often considered a return to form—an almost filmic Renaissance. Here, films, directors and actors grew increasingly cynical and increasingly complex. By the 1970s, film had not only become an established medium, but an acceptable form of expression and art. American directors became post-French New Wave auteurs, not only creating a filmic style all their own, but skewing Hollywood convention in the beginning stages of postmodernism.<br />
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Relationships became increasingly complex in the cinematic realm, possibly as a mirror to what film auteurs saw as an increasing societal complexity. Here, seen most clearly in the work of Woody Allen, the camerawork becomes increasingly complicated as the character relationships become increasingly complicated.<br />
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Allen's 1979 follow-up to <i>Annie Hall</i> and the less successful<i> Interiors</i> extends the thematic elements of the prior two films yet becomes even more relational than <i>Annie Hall</i> (<i>Manhattan</i>, while still all too autobiographical, is much less about Allen's neuroticism and much more about interaction) and more focused on space than the aptly titled <i>Interiors</i>.<br />
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Much of <i>Manhattan</i>'s magnificence is due to the fact that it is seemingly unclassifiable, but unmistakably romantic comedy. Allen knows how romantic comedy works, both thematically and formally. One look at <i>It Happened One Night</i> or <i>Bringing Up Baby</i> will lie out the framework for the romantic comedy Allen reconstructs. In these classic, quintessential screwball comedies, lovers move from careful one-shot to two-shot compositions, always bringing the couple together in such a way that the audience knows who will end up together before the characters do. <br />
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A further exploration into comedy reveals that physical comedy (as evidenced in Allen's own <i>Bananas </i>and<i> Sleeper</i>) takes place in long-shot, only moving into the range of medium-shot for a character to deliver a one-liner. <i>Manhattan</i> acts within these cinematic rules as the characters move from one-shot to two-shot depending on the nature of their intimacy, and the physical distance always has us questioning what exactly is <i>funny</i> about the human condition and the desperate search for love.<br />
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Even more so than the intentionally funny <i>Annie Hall</i>, <i>Manhattan</i> presents us with greater complicated situations shown, again, though increasingly complicated camerawork; situations are less funny to the characters and more challenging to the audience. In a scene where the Isaac Davis (Woody Allen) and Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton) converse though in separate rooms, the fragmented nature of their relationship and the tension and uncertainty of their future (due, in part, to their own personal issues) is dealt with almost exclusively through Allen's camerawork. <br />
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Allen demanded that the video version of <i>Manhattan</i> be letterboxed—the first of its kind—for aesthetic reasons: to preserve the aspect ratio of intentional one-shots so that they are not mistakenly formatted as conventional one-shots. In this particular scene, the two are communicating from separate rooms and are never seen on screen together. Not only that, even the one-shot compositions are not conventional one-shots. As Isaac talks to Mary, he’s in the far left of the screen with a wall taking up the majority of the frame. The same is then shown when the camera cuts to Mary who is to the extreme right of the screen, with wall still taking up the majority of the frame. The emptiness of the visuals speaks more clearly about the character's situations than Allen's witty, brilliant dialogue ever could.<br />
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Of the myriad relationships manifest throughout <i>Manhattan</i>, the one that works best is no less complex. The relationship between Isaac and Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) is complicated in that she is less than half his age and still in high school. In what would be a typically romantic scene in conventional Hollywood cinema (thought this particular scenario would never manifest itself in traditional Hollywood cinema), Isaac descends the stairs to the right of the frame and moves to sit on the sofa with Tracy at the left of the shot. Yet, though the two are framed together, it would be hard-pressed to call the composition a two-shot. They are seen in extreme long-shot, barely recognizable if not for the voices, and far left of center. This is the least conventional “romantic” two-shot of anything in romantic comedy through the 1970s as the detached camera work expresses the intrinsic problems of the relationship.<br />
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Allen forces the camera to become a recognizable tool that draws attention to itself—more an omniscient character rather than a subversive apparatus. Yet <i>Manhattan</i> is much greater than the camerawork. The visuals are, quite uncynically, breathtaking. Perhaps a love deeper than any relationship explored throughout the course of the film is Allen's love for New York City. If Allen deconstructs the idea of the romantic, there is no cynicism in Allen's directorial eye and Gordon Willis's cinematography. One need look no further than the cover to see that Allen can make the 59th Street Bridge become a place you'd actually feel safe observing from a park bench at night. Only in the movies.<br />
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Whether or not Isaac believes the naïve Tracy when she tells him that "not everybody gets corrupted," (despite the optimistic conclusion, Allen's cynicism has no one convinced he believes it possible) New York is so painstakingly uncorrupted that we understand where Allen's heart lies. Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" underscores Allen's narration in one of the finest opening sequences in film history, challenging both the human desire and instinct (which is the true joke of the piece: the long-shots <i>are</i> examples of physical comedy at the characters' expense—love <i>is</i> funny) while simultaneously embracing Manhattan who, despite the barrage of complex relationships, becomes the true star.Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-78398314206704432562015-07-03T15:35:00.000-07:002015-08-13T13:12:34.528-07:00Authorship as Art Cinema in Ingmar Bergman's Persona<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>There is an old story of how the
cathedral of Chartes was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then
thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant
procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old
site. They worked until the building was completed—master builders, artists,
labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained
anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the Cathedral of Chartes.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i></blockquote>
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<i><i>—Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman</i></i></div>
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In this commentary on his own film,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The Seventh Seal</i>, Ingmar
Bergman would have us believe that film stands on its own as a work of art, as
if somehow any pretension of "art cinema" can be washed away by the
simple analogy between a concrete and abstract work of art—that any ideas of
authorship are irrelevant because, somehow, the artist is not solely
responsible for his work.<br />
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In a way, Bergman is right, as the auteur theory has
allowed some filmmakers the right to produce painfully self-absorbed work with
little social purview, and others to never move outside a rut of established
convention. Instead, most art cinema exists in between these extremities; the
director is obviously important to the films he produces, but in order for the
work to have social value, it must not be limited to individual reflection.
Perhaps in art cinema, more than any other genre, the films strike a balance
between social value of new modes of filmmaking and the significance of an
auteur's canon.<o:p></o:p><br />
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That isn't to say there are no
establishments within art cinema. The model is more abstract than—and in many
ways runs counter to—the modes of classical production, but there remain
certain tendencies in art cinema which indicate, while these films may not be
necessarily formulaic, they also do not exist on such an abstract, independent
plane.<o:p></o:p><br />
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In<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Visual Pleasure And Narrative
Cinema</i>, her attack on traditional narrative film, Laura Mulvey argues for
the institution of a new kind of cinema. She states that the classic narrative
is, by its very nature, degrading to women. The scopophilic instinct which intrinsically
presents women as passive objects of the male gaze makes narrative cinema a
male institution. Narrative cinema also portrays a façade of "avoidance of
choice." Not only are the thematic and formal tendencies of narrative
cinema made to look as if there is no other way for the story to be told, but
the nature of narrative cinema also strives to avoid the obvious: the film is a
film.<br />
<br />
However, though art cinema acts as an establishment with key—almost
calculated—inconsistencies, it still possesses a liberty unique from classic
cinema. Classic cinema takes on a male point of view in its narrative. Art
cinema does not take on a female perspective, nor do its directors (still
mostly male) seem to address the issue. However, art cinema is, by definition,
more open to these changes in point of view and realities portrayed on the
screen. Mulvey recognizes that a more postmodern approach needs to be taken
that would, as Jim Naremore writes, "fragment identity and identification,
decentering the character, the reader, and the author" (Naremore).<o:p></o:p><br />
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Perhaps the "new cinema"
for which Mulvey advocates can be found in the canon of Ingmar Bergman films.
Not that his films exist as a solitary unit in which one must understand the
artist in order to understand the thought represented, but art cinema
represented in the works of Bergman, specifically his 1966 film<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i>, represent this new
narrative technique. His films do not operate contrary to the establishments of
narrative cinema; rather, art cinema is a new cinema altogether parading a new
reality. Bergman's work is important not simply in the conventional sense of
auteur theory, but is much broader in scope. François Truffaut believed that a
true film auteur "...brings<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>something
genuinely personal to his subject instead of merely producing a tasteful,
accurate but lifeless rendering of the original material" (Buscombe).<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
In this sense, Bergman is truly an
auteur. His films are a work of his own, as he wrote the majority of his
filmography himself as well as being a perfectionist behind the camera. Bergman
didn't settle for stale interpretations of previously written work; rather, his
work contained highly personal struggles with universal appeal. Just as<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Fanny and Alexander</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is autobiographical in the
psychological and spiritual abuse under a strict Lutheran household, much of
his work deals with such personal struggles that grew out of these experiences
with the silence of God (<i>The Seventh Seal, Through A Glass Darkly, Winter
Light</i>), suggesting authorship is apparent beneath the works.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>also holds highly personal elements, but the finished
product stands on its own foundation. As Bergman stated, "Art is free,
shameless, irresponsible," he would have us believe his films don't exist
in relation to the artist (Ingmar Bergman: …) . However,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona </i>could not have come
about without personal experience. Written in a hospital amidst dizzy spells
that left him immobile, <i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>clearly
deals with issues of isolation and knowledge of self. Afraid that he would
never be able to make films again, <i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>also suggests that the artist needs art,
and art needs life. These elements draw from each other, relative to the
combination of Alma and Elisabeth's identities. Although Bergman believed that
art was essentially in a postmodern state as early as 1965, comparing art to a
"snakeskin full of ants"—long dead, yet filled with life—<i>Persona</i> was indeed created out of
personal need, but stands as a whole, a critique of art as well as a piece of
innovative art cinema (“Ormskinnet”). Like the Cathedral at Chartes, <i>Persona</i> is an artistic vision that bears
its own weight.<o:p></o:p><br />
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The critique of classic narrative
cinema often revolves around the representation of women. Classic narrative
cinema often simplifies representations in order to move the plot. Since women
are often mere objects, their roles are just as simplistic. Diametric
oppositions play a large role in narrative cinema, and women are viewed in
opposition to the stereotypical positive and aesthetic masculine roles.
Character complexity often muddles the plot of narrative cinema, so female
roles have historically been distilled to "whore" and
"virgin"—as if women can only be viewed in relation to their sexual
nature. Sure, Ingmar Bergman has represented both virgin (<i>The Virgin Spring</i>)
and whore (<i>Sawdust and Tinsel</i>), but
the character representations are never merely at surface level.<br />
<br />
Bergman
consistently represents women in cinema not only as complex while operating away
from the established structures of narrative cinema. It could be said that
Bergman avoids these sexist binaries because he makes, just as Mulvey
advocates, a new kind of film. His work operates outside of established formal
boundaries and transcends historical gender representation because of it; not
that it is of primary importance, nor even the intent of much of art cinema,
but the new tendencies of art cinema allow these innovative narrations to
occur.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Art cinema is, in a way, a
postmodern practice. It calls for new interpretations of realism, which oppose the classic paradigm thus obliterating classical diametric
oppositions. If classic narrative cinema followed the objective reality
revolving around a central plot as a series of coherent events, art cinema
sought to search for a new reality in a new form. These new forms are
represented as subjectivity, which not only lean more towards psychological and
social application than a singular objective view, but incorporate a<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>mise-en-scène</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>of voluntary formal incongruities.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Unlike classic narrative cinema,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>makes no attempt to appear as if it
has avoided choice in formal decisions. Although narrative cinema is driven by
plot,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i>'s<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>plot
is as murky as its subject matter. An actress, Elisabeth Volger (Liv Ullmann)
has walked off stage and gone (voluntarily?) mute and is admitted to a
psychiatric ward. Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) is given watch over her. The two
travel to a secluded summer beach house, where Alma is to document Elisabeth's
progress.<br />
<br />
Simple enough, but<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is clearly not about plot. The events
teeter between fantasy and reality—with no grounding structure—as the viewer is
isolated by both spatial and chronological discontinuities. Form becomes the
medium in which art cinema exerts its differences from the classical paradigm.
Mulvey would be in favor of the complexity—indeed, the inconsistency—of
identity between Elisabeth and Alma. Their characteristics are never constant,
and we question not only the extent of Alma's deterioration, but the purpose of
her actions, as the film offers neither solutions nor closure to the situations
it presents.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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Alma and
Elisabeth trade places. Alma becomes mentally weaker, questioning her sanity. Elisabeth becomes stronger, metaphorically
(and physically if one adopts the vampirism interpretation near the end of the
film) draining Alma of her strength. But as the film unravels through what are
essentially monologue sequences as Alma is the only character talking, the film
is presented, for the most part, as a series of scenes in which Alma talks to
Elisabeth. These scenes alternate between day and night with no indication of
chronology. Formally, Bergman often displaces characters, both by having them
appear in different places while apparently in the middle of the same story, as
well as constantly breaking the 180-degree rule, viewing characters from
different angles throughout rooms, and jarring audiences with spatial
incongruity.<br />
<br />
The multifaceted reality of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>intentionally leaves these gaping
holes. These unsettling plot differences, sometimes as apparent as actual
objects appearing out of place (Elisabeth sits at a table with a picture of her
son that she ripped up earlier in the film) hearken to David Bordwell’s theory
of "calculated gaps in the syuzhet" (Bordwell). To stray from the objectivity of the classic
narrative, art cinema must take on formal objections to undo the linear
establishment of cause-and-effect.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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The difficulty of the film is made
no easier by the subject matter. In one scene, Elisabeth appears to whisper
that Alma had better go to bed before she falls asleep. Alma responds, as if
confused by saying, "I better go to bed before I fall asleep." This
scene is followed with Elisabeth entering Alma's bedroom, Alma seeing her, and
Elisabeth exiting. The next morning, Alma asks Elisabeth if she came into her
room or talked to her last night, to which Elisabeth quizzically shakes her
head, no. The audience has no reason to believe that Elisabeth is lying, yet
the film offers no objective truth. No camera transitions, lighting
differences, or visual effects indicate whether these discontinuities are
subjects of fantasy by either character, hallucinations by Alma, or actual
events. And that is the point. We are not allowed easy answer to these
situations; instead, Bergman adopts these tendencies of art cinema to broaden
our reality. It is no coincidence that there is so much talk of psychology in <i>Persona</i>;
this film is intended to operate on a psychological level. The formal
discontinuities free the viewer of linear thinking, establish the differences
between objective reality of classic narrative and open up new possibilities
for the narrative of art cinema.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
For the same reason, there is also
no closure to the film. Alma boards a bus in one of the final shots without any
closure and, though there is a brief shot of Elisabeth on stage, it parallels
the shot at the beginning of the film, making the audience wonder at what point
in time the shot takes place. The same could be said of the scene in the clinic
at the end the film. Alma asks Elisabeth to just repeat for her a single word
to which Elisabeth finally whispers, "nothing." The circumstances are
identical to the clinic at the beginning of the film and the viewer is left
wondering if the event actually took place, when it took place, if either
character is stronger than the other, and to where was Alma headed on that bus?
These questions are not answered, nor are they meant to be answered. Bergman's
thematic and formal discontinuities give us a film of characters, not
resolutions.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
In addition to incongruent<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>mise-en-scène</i>, art cinema
stresses the trivial aspects of everyday life as equally important to
cause-and-effect tendencies of classic narrative. What begins with Alma
happening to drop her glass on the patio—an entirely innocent and happenstance
event—becomes a way in which Alma's psychological deterioration is measured.
Again, it is by chance that Elisabeth fails to seal her letter, which Alma
takes to the post box. Alma's increasing hatred for Elisabeth, and eventual
mental decline is not due to a clear cause-and-effect relationship as in
classic narrative, but to the chance occurrence of Elisabeth failing to seal an
envelope. These techniques, while in contrast to objective reality, can at the
same time point the finger back at themselves.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Film is also, by nature, a social
event meant to be experienced within a group of people. Art cinema is
postmodern in the sense that the work is a collage of edits which offers up
difficult questions posed by the director who nonetheless rarely offers bias
nor answers to them. The culmination of image and sound therefore are left open
to interpretation and discussion to an audience as varied as each individual in
the theater.<br />
<br />
But above all else,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is exactly that: a film. And<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona </i>knows it is a film.
While classic narrative cinema uses film to tell a story, it avoids thematic
and formal choice insomuch as it tries to not look like a film. Bergman makes
clear from the opening shot that<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is nothing but a film and reminds us
of this throughout. The film begins with shots of a projector and film reels,
followed by a series of rapidly edited shots throughout the opening credits
ranging from a silent comedy to an erect penis projected onto a screen. This
onslaught of imagery reminds the viewer of the power of imagery, and how<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is a moving image.<br />
<br />
The film opens with
an unidentified boy looking up and touching a screen undulating between the
blurred faces of Elisabeth and Alma. The boy is placed in an isolated, white
room with the camera facing him in bed. As the camera reverses shot, we see the
boy floating in front of the screen, which takes up the entire shot. This shot
recalls the voyeuristic nature of cinema, as the boy (one of only two male
characters in the film, and not central to the "narrative") caresses
the screen, just as the viewer relates to the motion picture. The film ends in
much the same way, as the boy is still looking at the screen, still separated
from the narrative, until the final shot represents a film being pulled from
the reel and the screen goes white.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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<br />
This isn't the only blatant formal
reminder that<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is a film, and in many cases, form is
used as a metaphor of the relationship between Alma and Elisabeth. What could
be more distracting to narrative cinema than having the film literally break
just as the tension is mounting? This is the technique Bergman employs. As soon
as the first signs of physical and emotional violence surface between the two,
Bergman interjects with projector noise, and cuts off half of the screen as if
the film has broken. This is followed by an animation that looks as if the film
has been burnt, and after seconds of white screen and backwards dialogue, the
film repeats the violent, rapid edits from the opening sequence and a close-up
of an eye; not only reminding the viewer that<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is a film, but rather bluntly, turns
the eye back onto the audience.<br />
<br />
If form follows function, it is clear Bergman
isn't intending<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>to be a direct narrative. It simply
doesn't follow the rules. Instead, the film takes on a rigid form for a
different purpose altogether. Formal techniques are made to be noticed—the
choices are deliberate and Bergman wants the audience to understand this. Form
parallels the struggle between the characters and helps pose the questions
Bergman is asking. These are not questions of narrative but of character
psyche.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
By not utilizing the traditional
narrative style, Bergman is able to create characters that exist outside of its
constraints. Women are, therefore, not subject to gender roles but a thorough
character exploration encompassing both polarities of the pre-established
gender spectrum. That isn't to say<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is not about gender—it clearly is—however,
Bergman both establishes an uncanny understanding of women and destroys narrative
conventions, allowing the audience to associate with the main characters, in a
way contrarian to Mulvey's arguments.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Conventional narrative cinema has
defined women in opposition to appealing and decidedly masculine qualities. The
male role (which has consistently been the dominant role throughout the history
of cinema) is not only to be admired, but becomes a surrogate through which the
viewer vicariously lives. Characteristics such as strength and dominance are
acceptable and encouraged in the active male role while the female role, by
default, becomes the passive and powerless object to be looked at rather than
looked through.<br />
<br />
Women, too, have positive qualities (traditionally nurture,
motherhood and faithfulness) but these attributes are loaded as each buys into
the precept of subordination. Each quality comes through sacrifice of
individual will, as if women can only exist in relation to others, lacking individual
agency. Bergman recognizes these binaries, but refuses to operate within the
simplistic (and as Mulvey argues, sexist) formula. Male roles are notably
absent in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i>, and
Bergman slides both female characters up and down the pre-established
diametrics.<br />
<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Indeed, women hold the full
capacity for both physical and emotional strength and weakness, violence and
helplessness, sacrifice and dominance and are neither admired nor despised
because of it. Rather, Bergman deals with these distinctions as a result of
human nature, irrelevant to gender. The film begins at the extreme ends of the
established female poles. Alma, a nurse is given the traditionally female role
of nurturer and caretaker. Elisabeth is given the traditionally female role of
physical weakness and mental instability, as she is admitted to a hospital. As
Bergman weaves us through the narrative, he shows us different characteristics
for each woman. Each takes on roles that would be considered
"masculine" in traditional narrative cinema, but Bergman isn't
pleased with such simple associations.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Alma and Elisabeth slowly become
competitors—not for the attention of men—but feeding off of each other for
individual strength. In this sense, gender is transparent. Elisabeth begins the
film in a visibly weakened state. She lays helpless, lethargic and apathetic in
a secluded hospital room. Though she remains mute, there is identifiable
progress after the two move to the beach house. Elisabeth walks around the
beach, keeps up with Alma, and appears happier and more active. At one point,
Alma notes that she will inform the hospital of Elisabeth's progress, as she is
now enjoying novels. However, Elisabeth seems to be drawing her strength from
Alma. Elisabeth becomes a subtle, yet omniscient symbol of mental strength,
despite her diagnosed state of unrest. She appears as if her state is a chosen
one; a role acted out as if she were on stage once more. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
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Her mental strength becomes so dominating that
Alma physically threatens her on multiple occasions. At the end of the film,
one is left to assume that if Elisabeth has not returned to full strength, she
is at least in a stalemate with Alma, who visibly weakens in emotional and
mental health. Though Bergman introduces Elisabeth in a traditionally female
role, her following attributes differ greatly from the stereotype. Her
helplessness turns into strength, and Elisabeth is seen more as an individual
than an object. Neither is Elisabeth selfless, rather she seems to gain her
power through the lessening of another.<br />
<br />
In one of the final scenes, Elisabeth
takes Alma by the wrist, bends down and puts her mouth to it. Metaphorically,
Elisabeth is sucking the physical and mental life from Alma and is gaining at
her expense. Elisabeth is portrayed as a character outside of traditional
female roles, neither selfless nor cruel, and portrays the strength of an individual
rarely seen in cinema.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Alma is no less an interesting
female figure. Again, Bergman places her in a traditional female role as nurse
and caretaker. She is placed in a position of authority over Elisabeth yet the
authority is questioned as Alma's own mental strength declines. Alma possesses
both ends of the spectrum, as she is both nurturing and violent. As soon as
Alma catches on to the possibility that Elisabeth might be using her, she puts
aside her nurturing characteristics, as if they are independent from character
and nature. Alma drops a glass while sunbathing yet deliberately leaves one shard
on the ground while Elisabeth is walking barefoot. Bergman captures the
internal struggle of human nature, despite gender, as Alma possesses both
selfish and selfless attributes.<br />
<br />
It becomes quite evident that the struggle for
power between the two increases when Alma questions Elisabeth's intentions. At
this point, Elisabeth is the strongest in the relationship yet, when Alma
demands that she speak, the conventionally uncharacteristic female struggle for
power is put in motion. Alma threatens Elisabeth with a pot of boiling water
(in another formally jolting scene which crosses the 180-degree line, appearing as if the two are in a new location altogether) to which Elisabeth
declares, "No, don't." For one moment, the power has shifted in the
relationship between Alma and Elisabeth, as the physical threat of violence is
employed for personal gain. In the scene in which Elisabeth appears to suck the
blood from Alma, Alma is in such a state of physical weakness that she begins
slapping Elisabeth repeatedly. Violence is far from a traditional female
attribute, but Bergman is uninterested in convention. Alma and Elisabeth are
both human and both move along the stereotypical binary opposition of gender.
Both are helpless and violent. Both are weak and strong. Both are selfish and
selfless. Bergman creates two females who exist in contrast to classic
narrative cinema, thus both are essentially more real despite the film’s
self-reflexivity.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Gender is therefore defined not in
contrast to a pre-established masculine role, but the formal tendencies of art
cinema allow these alternate realities to exist on film. Sex becomes an equally
important element to art now that classical narration has been removed. Just as
Bergman suggested, many of these elements operate on psychological levels
because of the relationship between art and life. Many may not be intended by
the author; in fact some formal techniques came about by accident. As if a
blatant critique on classical narrative,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>contains elements of voyeurism that
point to the voyeuristic nature of cinema.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Not only does Bergman turn the
camera on the audience, both by using screens within the movie, and one shot in
which Elisabeth pops up in front of the camera with a camera of her own, as if
taking a picture of the audience, he presents the voyeurism within the film as
uncomfortable through thematic and formal techniques. The most sexually graphic
scene in <i>Persona</i> is relayed solely
through dialogue. By denying the visual element to the events, the viewer is
even more uncomfortable. He is not placed at a distance, watching as if others
are unaware of his presence; instead he is in a dark room hearing Alma confess
sins in a way which can evoke no visual pleasure. The predominant shot of
evoking voyeurism employs formal techniques to again make the viewer aware of
the voyeurism.<br />
<br />
Again, in the scene in which Alma breaks her drinking glass and
determines it to be a way for her to induce physical pain in retaliation for
her weakening mental state, Bergman places the camera at a distance. The shot,
framed by a tree, suggests the voyeuristic nature of cinema as Alma is also in
a bathing suit. The formal technique employed is the long-shot, and Bergman
holds it for an extended take of almost ninety seconds. Through such an elapse,
the viewer becomes aware of his watching, and grows increasingly uncomfortable.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
The most striking scene of formal
innovation occurs toward the end of the film, in which Alma confronts Elisabeth
about her marriage and her son. The film is presented in two takes: the first,
a close up of Elisabeth's face while Alma lectures her about her weaknesses as
a wife and mother; the second, reversed and repeated, this time as a close-up
of Alma's face as she fervently lectures. Immediately, it is the formal
technique which draws the most attention as the audience is again asked to
remember the film is a film. Voyeurism,
too, is brought into practice as we watch and hear the same dialogue twice at
different perspectives.<br />
<br />
Metaphorically, the scene describes how each character
comes to a realization that they are feeding on each other. Each recognizes her
traits are similar, and her weaknesses are shared. The scene ends with
Elisabeth appearing to suck the blood from Alma's wrist, as we are again
reminded that the two draw from each other. Interestingly, this scene stands as
a testament to film standing as a piece of art without pretense of authorship,
as its formal arrangement offers judgment of complex realities in a way
classical narrative cinema could not, though it wasn't originally intended to
do so. Liv Ullmann explains
that the scene<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><nobr>"...was</nobr><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>supposed to be cut up, using the best
from each. But when he saw it as a whole, he didn't know what to pick. So he
used them both." Of course, Bergman made the formal decision to place both
scenes in the film, however the free conventions of art cinema allowed Bergman
to recognize the importance both takes captured and was able to formally place
them together in a way that, regardless of authorship, the film is all the
stronger for.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Voyeurism is thus employed not only
in gender experimentation, but as a metaphor for film as art. Bergman's formal
techniques make the viewer not only recognize that<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is a film, but recognize that he tends
to project himself onto the screen in order to find, as art cinema intends, new
realities about the world. The audience projects itself onto the screen, just
as Alma and Elisabeth project their personas onto each other. Elisabeth, an
artist, feeds on the life of Alma as the audience feeds on the film. The film
is also the product of the author's feeding from life. These new identities
within art cinema are exactly the complexities that Mulvey insisted were
missing from classical narrative cinema.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>stands as a work which allows these
complexities between characters, viewers, and artists and, just as Mulvey
suspected, the gender roles change drastically.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Art cinema intentionally sets out
to present new realities in film. Classical narrative is too narrow in scope,
and does not suffice for the realities art cinema needs to address. In a sense,
the conventions of classical narrative cinema are obsolete. Classical narrative
was quickly becoming "film history," and new interpretation and
judgment was needed to understand the modern world. These new interpretations
were presented in innovative formal arrangements which followed the philosophy
that multifaceted realities did not follow linear storytelling. The meaning is,
instead, given through intense personal introspection. Within art cinema,
authorship becomes another formal technique to present these realities.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is a difficult film. However, its difficulty is its
strength as personal expression and objective realities can only exist through
these complexities. Authorship is a formal tendency, perhaps, most important to
art cinema. It presents alternate realities because it includes personal
expression of the author. The personal nature of film simultaneously presents
broad realities and expressive motifs. Classical narrative cinema cannot
provide these broad definitions of reality due to its narrow-minded, linear
structure.<br />
<br />
Bergman is able to work on many levels because of art cinema's
formal tendencies.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Persona</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>is therefore equally important as a
work of personal expression and a "free, shameless, and
irresponsible" piece of art. The film offers no easy answers, which is
exactly why complex issues such as psychology and gender can exist within the
work. Authorship is monumentally important as a formal technique in art cinema.
Bergman shows how these techniques can address issues in film previously repressed
within the classic narrative paradigm. As in the anecdote of the building of
Chartes Cathedral, it is not for the author's sake that we ponder these
ambiguities, but for the film's.<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
=========================<br />
<br />
<u>Works Cited</u><br />
<br />
<br />
Bergman, Ingmar. <i>Four Screenplays Of Ingmar Bergman</i>. London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1960.<br />
<br />
Bergman, Ingmar. “Ormskinnet” <http://ingmarbergman.se/verk/ormskinnet> 1965.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bergman, Ingmar and Roger W. Oliver. <i>Ingmar Bergman: An
Artist's Journey on Stage, on Screen, in Print</i>. New
York: Arcade Pub, 1995.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bordwell, David. <i>Narration in the
Fiction Film</i>. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985.<br />
<br />
Buscombe, Edward. “Ideas of Authorship.”<i> Screen</i> 14.3 (1973): 75-85. <br />
<br />
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." <i>Screen</i> 16.3 (1975): 6-18.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Naremore, James. "Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism." <i>Film Quarterly</i> 44.1 (1990): 14-23.<br />
<br />
Ullmann, Li<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">v, and Robert E. Long</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">.</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></span><i>Liv Ullmann: Interviews</i>. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-90185862081322315912015-02-20T18:54:00.000-07:002016-01-17T01:33:14.651-07:0087th Academy Awards – Dream Ballot<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite seeing nearly 300 features and shorts which I
qualify as being 2014 releases, the Academy has much stricter rules. Due to the evolving landscape of cinematic
exhibition (and the proclivity of genre films being rushed to VOD) many of my
favorite films of the year weren’t even given the chance at contending as a
dark horse: I have seen only 87 productions that Oscar™ deems eligible for the big award. I don’t expect these percentages to get any
better as it seems doubtful the Academy will seek to accommodate for
films which circumvent the box office.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was going to do my traditional “who will win”/”who <i>should </i>win” thing, but I don’t want my
wife stealing all my picks in our pool so I’m doing something a little
different. Here are the nominations and
wins if they were selected by me, but still holding to Academy rules (with one notable exception). I saved this document
on my hard-drive as “bizarro Oscars,” so please understand this
format is weird, self-indulgent and that reader feedback is highly encouraged.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRITdrJkMwe7LFjv5a8uvXslLjUrx9beOGtdkrbuhST_h7xgof7WRl8pCEFxqWizbzsYskbjGbDA7oexFemPBjw44VT6an-AOYH4zCvf8nCGwzpJvDwmUQxNIBY5L_TsKFOxE6zG8Hq2c/s1600/bizarrooscar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRITdrJkMwe7LFjv5a8uvXslLjUrx9beOGtdkrbuhST_h7xgof7WRl8pCEFxqWizbzsYskbjGbDA7oexFemPBjw44VT6an-AOYH4zCvf8nCGwzpJvDwmUQxNIBY5L_TsKFOxE6zG8Hq2c/s1600/bizarrooscar.jpg" width="222" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(For obvious reasons I have ignored the shorts
categories. I have no idea how a film
becomes eligible in these categories and even less of an idea how they are
effectively narrowed down such that an individual film makes an impact. The short film has an incredible medium
called the Internet, and the Academy’s failure to recognize this is a testament
to their devotion to punctilio rather than innovative artistry.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The envelopes, please:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i></i></div>
<a name='more'></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfSwD1jujb5TE8K1c0Cn7jzsA19fU57QYQVJYgFMmPEk8KoYn9FL-40Ljhr-zfALCVryRQWDV5w1LVSee9m17pahVdpHz-7cnfTwuqLK7qK-Vcq4g8TBwzQZoM6uMpjrfbcDweHoszUZY/s1600/joaquin-phoenix-inherent-vice.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfSwD1jujb5TE8K1c0Cn7jzsA19fU57QYQVJYgFMmPEk8KoYn9FL-40Ljhr-zfALCVryRQWDV5w1LVSee9m17pahVdpHz-7cnfTwuqLK7qK-Vcq4g8TBwzQZoM6uMpjrfbcDweHoszUZY/s1600/joaquin-phoenix-inherent-vice.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>ACTOR –in a Leading Role</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m not being deliberately contrarian in opting for Tatum
and Oyelowo in light of the Oscar nominations.
Tatum carries <i>Foxcatcher</i> in a
role in which he shows more commitment than the kind of work Bradley Cooper has
received numerous accolades for in <i>American
Sniper</i>. And in a category in which
four of the five nominations go to actors depicting non-fictitious events, its
marginalization of Oyelowo is wrongheaded.
Still, Phoenix is a revelation.
Apologies to Brendan Gleeson.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>Joaquin Phoenix – <i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Oscar Isaac – <i>A Most
Violent Year</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Dan Stevens – <i>The
Guest<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Channing Tatum - <i>Foxcatcher</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
David Oyelowo – <i>Selma</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0xlPKn7OFsXKBSKckVJT9hE1e8jQsa97DyvcF9exZ3Y_B7fG4Bi9zAh9C6OP99ofkhSbBiVOgKXTy7CGlBi8qBW1xLYYy_MtZznAvCgYTbFiSWd1Q_1WSvYPdp_RY9kNcvPP0jb6X4jo/s1600/under-the-skin-scarlett-johannson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="346" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0xlPKn7OFsXKBSKckVJT9hE1e8jQsa97DyvcF9exZ3Y_B7fG4Bi9zAh9C6OP99ofkhSbBiVOgKXTy7CGlBi8qBW1xLYYy_MtZznAvCgYTbFiSWd1Q_1WSvYPdp_RY9kNcvPP0jb6X4jo/s1600/under-the-skin-scarlett-johannson.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>ACTRESS –in a Leading Role</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Best Actress
nominations are always fairly agreeable and I think this speaks most to the
lack of strong female roles. Hats off to
Julianne Moore who looks to take home her first, long-overdue trophy, but I’m
not going to condescend to her because <i>Still
Alice</i> is kinda terrible. What’s
worse, it’s for a role Julie Christie nailed—and was nominated for—just a few
short years ago. This would be like
giving Benjamin Walker the Best Actor award for depicting Abraham Lincoln and
Daniel Day-Lewis taking a back seat.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2014 was a strong year for Elisabeth Moss (I would be
inclined to give her Best Supporting Actress for the tone-deaf <i>Listen Up Philip</i>, but I can’t figure out
why this one is ineligible), #1-with-a-bullet among the elite <i>Mad Men</i> cast. I felt <i>Obvious
Child</i> was a little twee and underwritten, but Slate’s versatility (compare
to any three seconds of Mona-Lisa Saperstein) steals the show. And you didn’t think I was going to nominate
Dan Stevens and not Rosamund Pike, did you?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>Scarlett Johansson – <i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Elisabeth Moss – <i>The
One I Love<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Marion Cotillard – <i>Two
Days, One Night</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Jenny Slate – <i>Obvious
Child<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Rosamund Pike – <i>Gone
Girl</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>ACTOR –in a Supporting Role</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’m doing some presumption, but I’m guessing the VOD rule
which prohibits films exhibited on television from being Oscar eligible is why <i>Cold In July</i> is not listed as a
considered production this year. A
shame, too, as Sam Shepard and Don Johnson would battle each other for my vote
in this category. I also, reluctantly,
place Alfred Molina in this category due to decorum though I would have assumed
he received more screentime than John Lithgow. I really wanted to nominate Peter Dinklage for <i>X-Men: Days of Future Past</i>, but I didn't want to be <i>that</i> guy after already nominating Alan Pearson. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>J.K. Simmons - <i>Whiplash</i><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Mark Ruffalo - <i>Foxcatcher</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Alfred Molina – <i>Love
Is Strange</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Alan Pearson – <i>Under
the Skin</i><br />
Matthias Schoenaerts – <i>The Drop</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9FBVAEOh2NtBZAW22-BUBX2VeUncfwu7aeIGobov7BDsw5_heI8S96jAGFMMeqTlUkHQP1yWepS0zxBIxSExH1rI77YCHO8u22f1O85j362OavnVoAUSCBW-DtNmwoIadUNCb1-o7SzM/s1600/hong-chau-inherent-vice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9FBVAEOh2NtBZAW22-BUBX2VeUncfwu7aeIGobov7BDsw5_heI8S96jAGFMMeqTlUkHQP1yWepS0zxBIxSExH1rI77YCHO8u22f1O85j362OavnVoAUSCBW-DtNmwoIadUNCb1-o7SzM/s1600/hong-chau-inherent-vice.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>ACTRESS –in a Supporting Role</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The same VOD rule presumably prevented the eligibility of two ace Sara
Paxton performances (<i>Cheap Thrills</i>, <i>Love & Air Sex</i>), but the point is
mostly moot: Jessica Chastain wins this nine times out of ten, but Hong Chau
managed to steal every scene of <i>Inherent
Vice</i> she was in with extremely limited screentime. No small feat among the year's strongest ensemble
cast. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>Hong Chau – <i>Inherent Vice</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Jessica Chastain – <i>A
Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Carmen Ejogo – <i>Selma<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Laura Dern – <i>Wild<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
Tilda Swinton – <i>Snowpiercer</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>ANIMATED FEATURE FILM</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The outcry over <i>The
LEGO Movie</i> snub is a moot point since the real argument is whether it is better than <i>How To Train
Your Dragon 2</i> as the fifth best movie the Academy nominated. I don’t see five worthy contenders this year, in part because <i>Song of the Sea</i> has yet to receive much release.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>The Tale of the Princess Kaguya<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Big Hero 6<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Boxtrolls<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>CINEMATOGRAPHY</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can find no justification as to why <i>A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night</i> is not considered an
Oscar-eligible production and I would have it win this category were it among
the 323 eligible productions. I guess
something’s gotta slip through the cracks.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Blue Ruin<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Gone Girl<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>Bunim/Murray Award for WORST CINEMATOGRAPHY presented by NOKIA</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Top Five</b><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>COSTUME DESIGN</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What is the Academy to do with such a severe lack of
Victorian-era pictures this year? I
think the obvious answer is that they will further award Wes Anderson for the
type of thing for which he needs no enabling.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>A Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>God Help The Girl<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Selma<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>DIRECTING</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe it’s more of a production design quality which I love
about <i>A Most Violent Year</i>, but my other four nominations resemble
unquestionable authorship. What I look
for most in this category is a film that I couldn’t picture being told through
anyone else’s eyes. Certainly this is
true of Glazer, Anderson, Jarmusch and DuVernay. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Selma<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>A Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>DOCUMENTARY FEATURE</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eligible documentary films are another secret-handshake club
within the Academy which doesn’t play by the same rules as “Best Picture”
nominees. I have seen very few of the
shortlist, but what I have seen was pretty good. <i>Citizenfour</i>
is not only important, but a remarkably tense thriller. No documentary has ever been nominated for
Best Picture; that they are verboten on principle is nothing but industry
self-importance and a short-sightedness of the authorship behind the genre. <i>Citizenfour</i>
would make my top ten.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Citizenfour<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Last Days in Vietnam<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Manakamana<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>20,000 Days on Earth<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Life Itself<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>FILM EDITING</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here are five fantastic films with which editing set the
tone without being self-congratulatory.
None of them took twelve years to complete.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>A Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Guest<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Whiplash<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Gone Girl<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You guys know how this thing works, right? It’s stupid as hell. Every country gets to elect which film will
represent them for Oscar consideration.
This means that no two nominations can come from one country. This means that no foreign country that makes
an English language movie is eligible.
This means that no domestic movie made in a foreign language (this could
have been a sneaky way for <i>A Girl Walks
Home Alone At Night</i> to sneak in) is eligible. This also means that very few of the movies
within Oscar consideration are widely seen in the U.S., particularly before the
ceremony. As a staunch advocate of international cinema, it's always difficult to have anything but lackluster hopes for this category based on its format.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Force Majeure<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Two Days, One Night<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Ida<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Winter Sleep<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Norte, the End of
History<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><b>MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING</b></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Judging from their track record, the Academy should really
just change the name of this category to Best Prosthetic Nose.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Noah<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>MUSIC –Original Score</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sorry Hans Zimmer, but I want to notice a non-diagetic score
like I want to notice gimmicky camerawork (I’m looking at you, <i>Birdman</i>). Which is to say, very little. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I also wouldn’t consider <i>The
Grand Budapest Hotel</i> in this category is because music used to cut to the heart
in a Wes Anderson movie, and I hate that he is only now getting universal
acclaim after becoming a navel-gazing carbon copy of his former self.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>A Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Guest<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Tale of the
Princess Kaguya<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S62_FuXzppE" width="459"></iframe></div>
<div>
<b><u>MUSIC –Original Song</u></b></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve always had beef with this category because it seems
like a tall order for the Academy to select the best song in a medium
completely different from the one they are most familiar with and still rarely
get right. I’d like to point out a
relatively recent precedent in which “Falling Slowly” took home this award in
2007 despite breaking the Academy’s rules.
Rule 15:I:B states “an original song consists of words and music, both
of which are original and <b>written
specifically for the motion picture</b>.”
“Falling Slowly” was not technically original because it had been
performed and recorded by Glen Hansard’s band before the release of <i>Once</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Academy ruled that it remained eligible because, as an
independent feature, <i>Once</i> spent much
more time in production than the usual picture and because the public exposure
of Hansard’s work with The Frames was “minimal.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yet somehow, in 2014, Stuart Murdoch’s work with <i>God Help The Girl</i> is ineligible despite
adhering even more closely to the spirit of this ruling: the eponymous 2009
album consists of songs written specifically for the motion picture and even
helped fund the motion picture.
Certainly Murdoch’s name carries more weight than Hansard’s but the
album’s release wasn’t under the Belle & Sebastian name, and certainly
“Come Monday Night,” “I’ll Have To Dance With Cassie,” “God Help the Girl” and
“Down and Dusky Blonde” would be four easy nominations. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This rule seems to have burned Murdoch as both ends for,
when Belle & Sebastian tried scoring a traditional soundtrack with Todd
Solondz’s 2002 mess Storytelling, despite producing “original music written
specifically for the motion picture,” much of it went unused, breaking the “substantive”
part of the rule. Sorry, “Big John
Shaft.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ll round out my already <i>fault</i>-y top five with Charli XCX’s “Boom, Clap” from <i>The Fault In Our Stars</i>. It is substantive at an important part of
the film’s narrative and was the biggest soundtrack hit of the year. However, because it was eventually released
on her sophomore album some six months later, it is also ineligible. Rules in this category seem arbitrary and conquerable, and I will break all of them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>God Help The Girl</i>; God Help The Girl “Come Monday Night”<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>God Help The Girl</i>;
God Help The Girl “God Help The Girl”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>God Help The Girl</i>;
God Help The Girl “Down and Dusky Blonde”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>God Help The Girl</i>;
God Help The Girl “I’ll Have To Dance With Cassie”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Fault in Our Stars</i>;
Charli XCX “Boom, Clap”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>PRODUCTION DESIGN</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Throwing Wes Anderson a bone here; production design is the
only shadow left of his former game.
This would be a pretty tight race between <i>Inherent Vice</i>, <i>A Most Violent
Year</i> and <i>Only Lovers Left Alive</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>A Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Grand Budapest Hotel<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>John Wick<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><b>SOUND EDITING</b></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t have a lot to say here. There are few things more iconic and
gooseflesh-inducing than Godzilla’s roar.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Godzilla</b><o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>American Sniper<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Dawn of the Planet of
the Apes<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Edge of Tomorrow<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>SOUND MIXING</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yeah, I know this is a weird pick.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>The Guest<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Godzilla<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Interstellar<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Raid 2<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0HMLKXgVYxL7wmcbopf2NTK8EG8kC8vUoGMUrOye0-lAnBSEkrBC-hNdwDqb6s2phHvij4OnQpGrN8j_knwe1q0JNwugDyrfI_i4tlw0w6X7Zvp51ym3wv5SRbrm98R6aQX35pDsT1Xk/s1600/dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-koba-3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0HMLKXgVYxL7wmcbopf2NTK8EG8kC8vUoGMUrOye0-lAnBSEkrBC-hNdwDqb6s2phHvij4OnQpGrN8j_knwe1q0JNwugDyrfI_i4tlw0w6X7Zvp51ym3wv5SRbrm98R6aQX35pDsT1Xk/s1600/dawn-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-koba-3.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>VISUAL EFFECTS</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I feel like I’m cheating by not picking <i>Under the Skin</i> which has at least two visuals so haunting and
imperative to the theme that they will stick with me forever. Still, it’s remarkable how effortless the CG
looks in <i>Dawn of the Planet of the Apes</i>
which easily transcends genre.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Dawn of the Planet of the Apes<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Godzilla<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Interstellar<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Edge of Tomorrow<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>WRITING –Adapted Screenplay</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paul Thomas Anderson’s <i>Inherent
Vice</i>, like the recent adaptations of the Coen Brothers, is a flawless
depiction of not just Thomas Pynchon’s written word, but of an historical era
and a filmic genre. I know this won’t
win on Sunday night and the prize will likely go to a dumbed-down <i>Imitation Game</i>, but this award is
Anderson’s through and through.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Tale of the
Princess Kaguya<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Gone Girl<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Noah<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggwVfoBSw5TKWP0i31VXful5_rPEwLbXEaSfZtXRsIXIkMR9E-21YOQLoDRcE2VAonlqiZ5BPLp9yPl_FmWZERR0FLq9pEuFRRgq9kMFeNi6OMJFSZmXeBLXjVZMvhHI3SdlcNS5BYu5k/s1600/only-lovers-left-alive-hiddleston-swinton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggwVfoBSw5TKWP0i31VXful5_rPEwLbXEaSfZtXRsIXIkMR9E-21YOQLoDRcE2VAonlqiZ5BPLp9yPl_FmWZERR0FLq9pEuFRRgq9kMFeNi6OMJFSZmXeBLXjVZMvhHI3SdlcNS5BYu5k/s1600/only-lovers-left-alive-hiddleston-swinton.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>WRITING –Original Screenplay</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My nominations for best original screenplay show how great
film writing is more action than dialogue.
Four of the nominees belong to tense dramas in which much is said in
silence. The fifth, Jim Jarmusch’s
genre-defying vampire tale, evokes a universe so lush and rich in texture it
rivals any sci-fi/fantasy universe.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Force Majeure<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Foxcatcher<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>A Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Blue Ruin<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><u>BEST PICTURE</u></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I saved this category for last because, despite my diverse
“nominations,” it takes the suspense out of several minor categories. 2014 was an exceptionally strong year for
film across the board and this is evidenced by a foreign language film, an
animated film, a documentary and several genre pieces sitting among typical
Oscar fare. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Under the Skin<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Inherent Vice<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Only Lovers Left Alive<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Tale of the
Princess Kaguya<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Force Majeure<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Citizenfour<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Dawn of the Planet of
the Apes<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>Blue Ruin<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>The Guest<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<i>A Most Violent Year<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
So at the end of bizzaro-Oscar™ night, <i>Inherent Vice</i> takes home six awards and <i>Under the Skin</i> walks away with five and the biggest prize of the
night. These two films will likely
combine for zero awards on Oscar night which— in a perfect world— would be
rectified by bizzaro-Oscar™ host, Kanye West storming the stage and demanding
there are right and wrong answers in the liberal arts. This is my answer key.</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-21927982904218254482015-02-16T14:33:00.000-07:002015-02-20T19:42:57.105-07:00The Western as Ethnographic Barometer in Gunsmoke and Deadwood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgktXAfeOPDHFcul2oACv747fYwfrDictAapB64hSUKk4eR8wcJhyphenhyphenTigQJIWCpbim2mlfOxGSxpQUgtIx79kTqhntIkjx64yoMSgZ98V8lJOIci9_FKT6C0Fi5FPPJFRcWkn_c56Ad-4Fo/s1600/bullock.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgktXAfeOPDHFcul2oACv747fYwfrDictAapB64hSUKk4eR8wcJhyphenhyphenTigQJIWCpbim2mlfOxGSxpQUgtIx79kTqhntIkjx64yoMSgZ98V8lJOIci9_FKT6C0Fi5FPPJFRcWkn_c56Ad-4Fo/s1600/bullock.gif" /></a></div>
<br />
James Arness, the actor who portrays Marshal Matt Dillon in all twenty seasons of <i>Gunsmoke</i> (CBS: 1955-1975), had an interesting take on the ideologies behind the genre’s success. “A cowboy wasn’t tied down to one place or one woman,” he told <i>TV Radio Mirror</i> in 1964. “Nowadays people just don’t seem to have the intestinal fortitude to live the way they’d like. That’s why they tune in on Westerns, to get a breather from stifling conformity. They don’t want to see Matt Dillon—or any other lawman—come home and sweep the kitchen” (McBride 64).<br />
<br />
While, perhaps, coy or playing to character, the assertion is odd given the nature of the television medium. The American Western, more than any genre, reflects the morals and cultural feelings of the era in which they were produced. However, unlike the film industry’s predication of rugged individualism dependent on the trope of cowboys riding off into the sunset, during the heyday of the television Western, heroes needed to be domesticated in recurring roles. <br />
<br />
Arness’s ideologically ambiguous statement does any amount of cultural work. It presumes the television Western’s narrative is coded with rigid masculinity as well as insinuates its audience is (and its network would allow its program’s target to be) exclusively male. It ties (contrary to the ideological view of the very show he stars in) law and morality to non-conformity and self-government. It suggests the masculine ideal is too individualistic for community yet offers it through a social medium.<br />
<br />
Though fragments of these assumptions share some truth with the early Western in print and film, the television Western largely subverts these assumptions through both their serial format and consumerist ideologies. Textual analysis of the first seasons of <i>Gunsmoke</i> and <i>Deadwood</i> (HBO: 2004-2006) will examine how the television Western, though employing traditional genre tropes and themes, does not perpetuate absolute ideologies but is elastic, reflecting the cultures and formats in which they were produced. As paranoid, commercial artifacts of the Eisenhower-era Cold War and the lingering shadow of post-9/11, these programs’ use of Western language exposes an ethnological rift as the culture shifts from the perspective of victor to that of victim in terms of foreign policy.<br />
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<br />
The popularity of the Western in the years following World War II can be read as a reaction to the crisis of masculinity. As women were needed in the work force as men shipped off to the war, the number of working women increased from 12 million before the war, to 18 million by 1944 (Campbell 100). These women attained a disposable income (with little product during the war time on which to spend it) and an independence from domesticity they hadn’t seen before. The first decade of television in the “baby boom” era had the paradoxical work of convincing America of its patriotic duty to consumerism following the profitable war effort and convincing women that the earning necessary for familial consumerism was to be from a patriarchal single-earner who needed his wife to fulfill the domestic role.<br />
<br />
The government feared veterans returning from war jobless would escalate the crisis of masculinity so domestic gender roles became synonymous with national security. Elaine Tyler May discusses this “defensive domesticity” by arguing, “as the cold war took hold of the nation’s consciousness, domestic containment mushroomed into a full-blown ideology that hovered over the cultural landscape for two decades” (May 88). These two decades would be the Renaissance of the television Western which would help negotiate the fluctuating modes of ideological masculinity in the onset of the Cold War.<br />
<br />
If, as John G. Cawelti argues, “the modern Western emerged along with the need to mythicize the new values of mobility, competitiveness, and rugged individualism which were replacing the more community and family-oriented values of the nineteenth century,” it follows that the television Western would return to this nostalgic mythicism when the ideological pendulum swung back toward domesticity (Cawelti 152). <i>Gunsmoke</i>, the most popular and longest-running television Western of the Cold War era, employs no shortage of Western tropes. Its hero, the Stetson wearing, gun-slinging U.S. Marshal, Matt Dillon (played by James Arness) is given overt masculine qualities amid his complex characterization.<br />
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The role was originally intended for John Wayne whose filmic presence, even in 1955, was understood as exuding a masculine “impression of continuity and stability in an era defined by sociocultural fragmentation and instability” (Durham 49). Wayne passed on the project, but leant his credibility to an introduction of the show. In the series premiere of <i>Gunsmoke</i>, “Matt Gets It,” Wayne addresses the audience at home, saying of the program, “it’s honest, it’s adult, it’s realistic. When I first heard about the show, <i>Gunsmoke</i>, I knew there was only one man to play in it: James Arness.” This endorsement speaks to both the perceived masculine credibility of Wayne to judge a “man’s man” and of the show’s intent to structure its hero after the masculine prototype of Wayne’s gendered identity.<br />
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Matt Dillon’s toughness is established in the pilot episode where characterization of good and evil is black and white—complete with matching hats. Dillon is shot by a menacing, anarchic gunslinger, Dan Grat who has a number of notches in his gun including lawmen. The fact that Dillon has been shot approximately 56 times by his foes during the show’s twenty year run doesn’t take away from the narrative power of this introduction (Trimble). The structure abides by the Western trope which sets up the final duel in the street, but with no insignificant injury to Dillon. Grat’s formidable villain only bolsters Dillon’s heroism and masculinity when returning from death’s doorstep. Dillon is defined by his quick draw and by his physical capacity to overcome injury.<br />
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The opening credits of the eleven seasons <i>Gunsmoke</i> was filmed in black-and-white feature Dillon winning such a duel in the street, reminiscent of <i>High Noon</i>. The phallocentric symbolism connoting manhood with violence has a long history in the Western, and it is no different here. Mark H. Moss speaks of this crisis of masculinity as T.V. cowboys act out America’s Cold War fears stating:<br />
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While the cold war developed, its primary symbols seemed to be too intellectual or too technological for most people to comprehend in tangible terms. Guns seemed to be reassuring and familiar as well as something to which most men, having served, could relate. Like tools, they were seminal masculine artifacts. Although they were lethal, they had grand appeal to young boys. What seemed to be needed was a bridge between the two. (Moss 109-110)</blockquote>
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Not to extend the Cold War metaphor too far, but amid all the gunplay, it’s also of note that the first season of <i>Gunsmoke</i> features an awful lot of guns drawn though remarkably little gunfire. <br />
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Yet it’s important to read the character of Matt Dillon as both man and law. As John E. O’Connor and Peter C. Rollins note, “many of these [Western] heroes served as masculine role models for Americans—both on a personal level and in terms of a ‘cowboy’ outlook on foreign policy,” and Marshal Dillon is no different (O’Connor 20). In standing up for the marginalized, Dillon’s sense of justice (as well as that of the government-trusting audience in Cold War America) believes in due process.<br />
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But defending an unsavory member of society with the law of the land isn’t the same, in <i>Gunsmoke</i>, as believing that land has a place for them. In “The Queue” (Season 1 Episode 10), Dillon comes to the defense of a Chinese immigrant being bullied by a couple of town ruffians. Yet their budding friendship is colored by a rigid ideology of assimilation. Dillon tells Chen, “you gotta live as an American, not a Chinese” in a sermon that speaks overtly to the case of conformity in 1950s television. Dillon interrupts the town lynching of an ex-con accused of horse theft in “Hot Spell” (Season 1 Episode 2), having to answer to accusations: “is this what you call the law; protecting a killer and turning your back on us [‘fine upright citizens’]?”<br />
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In “Night Incident” (Season 1 Episode 6), Dillon follows a string of robberies, finally locating the culprits living on the outskirts of town. Victims of unkind circumstance, the couple exist in limbo—criminals who wanted a better life, but are outcasts from society. In both “Night Incident” and “Hot Spell,” a benevolent Marshal Dillon promises to provide the utmost justice for the marginalized—even going so far as to promise to get them on their feet after justice runs its course—but the result is the same. The outcasts’ only hope for survival is away from the constructed community of Dodge City. It is a strange paradox in which the law Dillon upholds is concrete, but the town his justice defends can’t provide a safe refuge for the downtrodden.<br />
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That is to say, although Marshal Dillon will fight to defend a bullied group, he subscribes to an ideology that not all are able to assimilate. Just as the unlikely hero of “Magnus” (Season 1 Episode 12) finds that Dodge “ain’t uncivilized enough” for his liking, Americans throughout the Cold War saw it the nation’s place to protect marginalized nations from the red menace, but also saw fit to close their doors to immigrants they deemed unworthy. Congress passed into law the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act despite President Truman’s adamant veto abhorring “the absurdity, the cruelty of carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations” proposed by the law (Truman).<br />
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The veto was overturned by the House and Senate and enhanced by the xenophobic rhetoric of the act’s writer, Sen. Pat McCarran, who argued, “this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished” (Gans 544). Though he would never refer to Dodge City as an “oasis,” Dillon relentlessly toes the line of duty as moral obligation. Yet an air of jingoism rings through his Boot Hill prologue in “The Killer” (Season 1 Episode 28) as Dillon brags, “it never bothered me, killing a man whose very existence was an offense to decent people.” <i>Gunsmoke</i>’s “‘cowboy’ outlook on foreign policy” is mitigated by conflicting national opinion. Dillon both empathizes with the foreigner yet often sees the foreigner’s place outside his well-guarded community. <br />
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<i> Gunsmoke</i>’s shift from marshal Western to domestic Western in the late 1960s exposes its adherence to romantic ideals in its early seasons. Writer William Blinn helped pen episodes for<i> Gunsmoke</i> in its domestic Western era of the late 1960s, and summed up its popularity as communal. “There was an ensemble feeling of caring and interrelationships and interconnectiveness. I wish I had friends like that,” Blinn says describing the friendships between Matt, Doc, Chester and Kitty (Marsden). Community is a much more abstract ideal in early <i>Gunsmoke</i>, and the heroic, individualistic exploits of Dillon which run counter to Blinn’s definition of series “interconnectiveness” might explain why the first six seasons were renamed <i>Marshal Dillon</i> when they entered syndication.<br />
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The romanticized Western’s heroic figure “reflected the conflict between traditional heroic individualism and new needs for commitment to society. He was characterized by his reluctance to commit himself to any particular social group, his ambivalence about what social groups were right and wrong, and his strong desire to retain his personal integrity and the purity of his individual code” (Cawelti 96). This purity in the ideals of the romanticized West explain Dillon’s monological laments atop Boot Hill, but always from the point of view of a victor. Dillon has been down but never out, and his 6’ 7” stoic frame quells the fears of his community and audience. <br />
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Michael Ray FitzGerald argues that, unlike the canonical Hollywood Westerns, television Westerns are “intrinsically revisionist from the beginning, because nationwide network coverage did not begin until 1951 [after American media perpetuated multiculturalism in allegiance against the Axis]. Hence there are few westerns on network television in which Indians were portrayed as murderous villains” (FitzGerald 56). This is largely true in <i>Gunsmoke</i> where, even if Native American characters are portrayed through broad stereotype (as with the good Indian sidekick, Golden Calf in “The Hunter” [Season 1 Episode 9]), the threats to communal safety are usually bandits marked by immorality rather than race. This is not the case, however, when the program makes a statement of broad communal reinforcement in Cold War “us vs. them” schema. In “Alarm at Pleasant Valley” (Season 1 Episode 39), Dillon and Chester encounter a family of homesteaders while returning to Dodge City. The family has been ravaged by a group of faceless Indian renegades and Dillon, true to domesticated Cold War ideology, encourages the family not to flee. Dillon confronts homesteader Sam Fraser in no uncertain terms:<br />
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Matt Dillon: Anything that’s good is worth fighting for. Now you’ve got a gun, you’ll find that those Indians are no tougher than anyone else once you make up your mind to fight them. </blockquote>
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Sam Fraser: I ain’t gonna fight ‘em, marshal. </blockquote>
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Matt Dillon: Well you will, Fraser. Somewhere or somehow, in one way or another, you’ll have to. Every man does. </blockquote>
Native Americans are unquestionably the “othered” enemy in this xenophobic episode, and Dillon, as ideological patriarch, sets the course for the nation in this allegory. J. Fred MacDonald argues much of the success of the television Western is tied up in its presentation as “a political morality play for the frightened, confused, and dispirited. It contained secular parables for a nation whose citizens built bomb shelters in their backyards, whose government leaders threatened massive nuclear retaliation against evil ‘bad guys,’ whose external enemies seemed perpetually poised for attack” (<i>Television and the Red</i> 139). Though the threat may not be nuclear, the perpetual threat of othered “bad guys” drives “Alarm at Pleasant Valley.”<br />
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Note Dillon’s jingoistic political language in response to Fraser; it’s an appeal to patriotism that not only makes little logical sense, but its framing is independent from the enemy. Ideologically, Dillon suggests, we must fight—regardless of circumstance—to defend domesticity. Dillon not only talks the Frasers out of retreating further west to California (subverting the spirit of the genre), but burns and dismantles the family’s wagon to fortify against the enemy. It’s an obvious metaphor for communal settlement enforced by the fact that, once Dillon and the Frasers successfully ward off attack, Sam doesn’t see why Matt would need to follow through on his promise to replace the family’s only form of transportation. “There’s no hurry, marshal,” Sam concedes, “we won’t be going any place.” <br />
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The episode’s narrative structure mimics not only countless Hollywood Westerns, but also the way in which American history framed World War II: decent Americans were minding their own business, were ruthlessly attacked by foreigners, rallied and secured the home front and came away victorious. American Cold War ideology attempted to contain fears through utilizing the same strategy, and early <i>Gunsmoke</i> reinforces these ideologies with a presupposition of victory. It isn’t strange then that the death of the television Western coincides with the disillusioned Vietnam era. Revisionist Hollywood Westerns in the 1970s—like Robert Altman’s <i>McCabe and Mrs. Miller</i> and Arthur Penn’s <i>Little Big Man</i>—took great effort to paint the West as driven by xenophobia, racism and corporate greed just as the genre’s increased representation of violence was intended as a sociopolitical statement.<br />
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Although the television Western only lasted as long as it did into the 1970s following a shift from marshal Western to domestic Western, following the lead of <i>Bonanza</i> (<i>Gunsmoke</i> included: poor ratings found it cancelled in 1967, only to be rescued and thrive for another eight seasons with a newfound “emphasis upon relevant human drama”), the political gulf between Western ideologies and the souring attitude of Americans regarding escalation of U.S. involvement in foreign affairs grew too wide to bridge (<i>Who Shot</i> 98). J. Fred MacDonald argues, “the television Western, even in its most violent manifestations, flourished because it meshed harmoniously with widely accepted social and political views of its times. If it is no longer viable, the reasons for its fall must be related to fundamental sociopolitical changes that render the genre obsolete” (<i>Who Shot </i>101). The New Hollywood directors of the 1970s and the critical success of their revisionist Westerns suggest that an increasing distrust of government and big business opposed traditional Western romanticism. For the television Western—and the medium’s insistence on sociopolitical conformity and containment—moral shades of grey weren’t as easy to depict.<br />
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The revisionary work of HBO’s <i>Deadwood</i> not only carries the baggage of post-Western disillusionment, but arrived at an unprecedented fracture in the American psyche. Initial patriotic solidarity following the 9/11 attacks and nationalistic support found President George W. Bush’s approval ratings at a Gallup-high 90%, but these figures consistently fell as the nation grew increasingly polarized, the war in Iraq grew murky, and the promise of retributive justice grew less cathartic. Bush’s approval rating dipped to 46%—the lowest of his tenure at the time—in the weeks following <i>Deadwood</i>’s debut (Newport). Fittingly, the show tackles issues of communal conscience and irrecoverable loss in its first season. If <i>Gunsmoke</i> arose in an era in which the American myth of romanticized, infallible virtue was both intrinsic to the nation’s view of itself within global politics and codified within the language of the Western genre, <i>Deadwood</i> subverts Western tropes—often presenting an alternative to genre expectation—and, in doing so, refracts the nation’s growing disillusionment toward the American myth. <br />
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Much has been made of the historical accuracy and aesthetic realism of the program and, indeed, creator David Milch rigorously researched the period and language through the use of informal letters, memoirs and period diaries (Barra 53). <i>Deadwood</i>’s demythification of the West is twofold: not only does the program subvert genre convention by refusing a whitewashed representation (Milch says in an interview, “I always thought [conventions of the Western] had more to do with what the Hays office would allow than with what happened on the American frontier”), its attribution of acute historic detail to historical figures makes the viewer—even amidst fictionalized sequences of great creative license—question how much of recorded history is myth (Barra 50).<br />
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While most every character is based on or adapted from an historic figure, none are household names with immediate audience appeal like the iconic Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Neither is afforded a hero’s treatment in characterization nor arc. Hickok is defined by his vices (drunkenness, gambling) rather than his canonized virtues (marshaling, gun slinging), and when he is killed off in only the fourth episode (“Here Was A Man”), the show establishes its black as pitch tone while pulling the rug from narrative convention. What’s more, Hickok is assassinated in such an unceremonious fashion (and his corpse even treated as a road-stop sideshow in “The Trial of Jack McCall” [Season 1 Episode 5]), that all of life seems vaporous in the nihilistic territory. <br />
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Jane mourns the death of her comrade, but again <i>Deadwood</i> refuses us traditional valiance. Rather than reach for a six-shooter in a duel in the street, Jane reaches for a whisky bottle and forfeits her recent aptitude for sobriety. As Jane retreats into the wilderness for an extended, drunken sabbatical, so are our hopes withered for a cathartic, redemptive punctuation to elevate Jane to our folk hero understanding of her. The narrative collapse of these two legends denies us both genre convention and the romantic myth to which it is tied.<br />
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Ironically, it is precisely because of Milch’s adherence to historical detail and subversion of expected tropes that <i>Deadwood</i>—as revisionist Western—achieves a strata which Marc Ferro describes as “no longer merely a reconstruction or a reconstitution, but really an original contribution to the understanding of past phenomena and their relation to the present” (Ferro 163). Presumed heroes become merely (yet tortuously) human, and the genre’s uncustomary emphasis on loss, victimization and moral ambiguity refracts the nihilistic paranoia of post-9/11 America while simultaneously painting the genre’s ethnographic myths as alien. <br />
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Jane’s untenable grief at the death of Hickok is juxtaposed with the unimaginable loss suffered by Norwegian orphan, Sofia. Of the many narrative threads the first season of <i>Deadwood</i> balances on tenterhooks, one of the bleakest follows the matter-of-fact massacre of the Metz family on the road back to Minnesota. In “Deadwood” (Season 1 Episode 1), Al Swearengen’s minions bungle a robbery and murder the family in the style of savage natives to avoid suspicion. When word of the massacre reaches town, Reverend Smith informs the newly-arrived business partners, Seth Bullock and Sol Star that the youngest child might have survived.<br />
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They join Hickok and a small company rides out in the middle of the night to the road to Spearfish and arrive to a grizzly scene: with the scalped and dismembered family preyed upon by wolves, and one of the dogs who is shooed away carries a leg in its mouth. After rescuers bring Sofia back to town, we don’t know her name for several episodes as she is mute at first and then speaks a foreign tongue. However, her silence (both literal and virtual) proves to be her only salvation when she is cared for by the ailing Doc Cochran. It’s a harrowing sequence of innocence lost amplified by the child being in persistent danger even after her rescue. <br />
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Swearengen hatches a double-edged plot in “The Trial of Jack McCall” to have his whore, Trixie both nurse Sofia back to health (ensuring she can’t identify her family’s murderers as White men) while keeping Alma Garret hooked on opium as to regain her husband’s claim after making her a widow. Unlikely matriarchs protect Sofia, but their success is more circumstantial than heroic. Jane keeps watch in Doc’s tent in “Deep Water” (Season 1 Episode 2), huffing and puffing bravado, boasting to Cochran, “believe me, anyone tries to getting’ in here who’s not you is gonna be damn fucking sorry.” Yet when she comes face to face with Swearengen who barges in to check on Sofia’s condition, again her cowardice belies her legacy and she is paralyzed, gun in holster. The female agency of Al’s whore, Trixie and Tolliver’s madam, Joanie allows them to each bide Sofia time; the former defies her boss’s orders knowing the consequence—though painful—will be lessened by Al’s soft spot for her, the latter uses what little independence she has earned with Tolliver to nurture Sofia in “Sold Under Sin” (Season 1 Episode 12). <br />
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Sofia can be read as a symbol for America’s lost innocence and, as a post-9/11 document, it’s significant that, though she survives, neither she nor her protectors are left untouched. The same cannot be said of other children in <i>Deadwood</i>’s nihilistic America. Alma conceives a child with Seth, only to lose the pregnancy and relapse into drug use in “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For” (Season 3 Episode 2). Seth’s adopted son William is killed when an escaped horse violently kicks through the thoroughfare in “Amalgamation and Capital” (Season 2 Episode 9). Joanie takes teenaged Flora under her wing at the Bella Union in the aptly titled “Suffer the Children” (Season 1 Episode 8), only to find she and her brother are con-artists out to rob the saloon. Cy Tolliver exacts his vengeful justice by executing the pair in Joanie’s room. Children have no special standing in <i>Deadwood</i> as neither Tolliver’s retribution, Swearengen’s equalizing greed nor fate’s hand offers any compassion.<br />
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As the Western genre acts as a barometer for ethnographic ideologies and has traditionally eulogized the values of the old West as a lament to what society has lost, <i>Deadwood</i> presents a community made up of loss. In “A Two-Headed Beast” (Season 3 Episode 5), one of the series’ most harrowing sequences pits Swearengen’s cold-hearted right-hand man, Dan Dority, against Hearst’s bodyguard, Captain Turner in a brutal showdown. Unlike Marshal Dillon who stoically and detachedly speaks of the dead atop Boot Hill, Dority escapes with his life, sits naked on the edge of his bed and weeps, not only at his recognition of mortality, but also for the price of trauma in catharsis. As much as the language, sex and violence of <i>Deadwood</i> are purposefully excessive in an attempt to counter the romanticism associated with the genre, the nihilism of moral ambiguity which supplants the Western’s traditional masculine hero is the show’s strongest revisionist exemplification. <br />
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In the era of the post-Western, a theme which continually haunts genre characterization is “the sense of decaying masculine potency” (Cawelti 39). This emasculation is just below the surface throughout <i>Deadwood</i>’s run. Even the program’s title/setting can be read as a reference to impotence in a series often concerned with literal and metaphoric castration (Reverend Smith, in a state of rapid mental deterioration, reads a passage from Romans about circumcision to some oxen in “Jewel’s Boot Is Made for Walking” [Season 1 Episode 11], Al Swearengen lies prostrate with kidney stones in the first half of season two), and it refracts the state of post-9/11 masculinity in America. Where Marshal Dillon is a virile authoritarian throughout <i>Gunsmoke</i>, the arguable lead character in the first season of <i>Deadwood</i> is Seth Bullock, but his path to law enforcement is neither self-confident nor morally absolute. The series pilot (“Deadwood”) evokes the first two episodes of 1955’s <i>Gunsmoke</i> (“Matt Gets It” and “Hotspell”) in terms of genre groundwork, but plays the Western tropes out to adverse ends. In a showdown in the streets between outlaw Dan Grat and Marshal Dillon in <i>Gunsmoke</i>’s pilot episode, the two share an ideologically rich dialogue after Grat kills Sheriff Hill:<br />
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Matt Dillon: Jim Hill was a lawman. He was here to arrest you for murdering an unarmed man in Amarillo. </blockquote>
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Dan Grat: I didn’t know that man was unarmed. </blockquote>
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Matt Dillon: Your mistake.</blockquote>
The black-and-white law in Dodge City is an almost divine absolute for which Dillon is a masculine-codified mediator. Such elevated respect for the law also places limitation on Dillon who, in “Hotspell,” protects an ex-con accused of horse theft by a lynch mob. In the pilot episode, “Deadwood,” Marshal Bullock is introduced spending his last night as a lawman in Montana before abandoning the tin star.<br />
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Bullock, too, is a mediator between a man arrested for horse theft and an angry lynch mob but, unlike Dillon, Bullock carries out the lynching of the accused himself. Marshal Dillon makes clear that he follows the letter of the law for the sake of its sanctity, but Bullock is up to something else. Yes, he is a man of conviction who can’t stand for an aberration of justice, but his fulfillment of justice is highly personalized. By hanging his prisoner, Bullock eschews due process in a display of questionable judgment but one which hedges its bets farthest from anarchy rather than taking on a worldview of absolutes. <br />
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“How does order develop without law?” David Milch asked in response to a question concerning his motivation behind creating the series. “In frontier societies where there is no central authority, how does order develop? It isn’t just a matter of brute force; even brute force can only be used by somebody with an idea of order. How does chaos evolve into order?” (Barra 50). The answer, throughout much of <i>Deadwood</i>, is damage control.<br />
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Yet the representations of morality and masculinity become more malleable when the circumstance is personal. Law in <i>Deadwood</i> is only as worthy as its lawmakers, and even our most devout (if reluctant) heroes have their own agendas. In both self-defense and retributive justice, Bullock exacts Western-coded violence in <i>Deadwood</i>’s first season. Once catharses have been realized, morally ambiguous shadows expose Bullock as the monster he sought to vanquish.<br />
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In “Plague” (Season 1 Episode 6), Bullock rides out in search of Hickok’s murderer only to be brutally attacked by a Native American. The two continue in hand-to-hand combat: an even more primeval expression of the genre’s preoccupation with masculinity. Surviving an awful blow, Bullock knocks out the Native American and, while his foe is down, zealously finishes the job by bashing his head fifteen times with a rock. Equal fervor is on display in “Sold Under Sin” when Alma’s father calls her honor into question. Seth pummels Otis Russell—who never throws a punch—with seventeen blows to the face.<br />
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It’s from the same episode in which our reluctant hero takes up his sheriff’s badge, uncomfortably tying together concepts of tainted humanity and law. Both scenes linger on a shot of Seth’s pulped handiwork, calling into question the reality—however justified—of retributive violence. Seth’s honorable respect for the law is impaired by his unconstrained emotion and is in direct foil to Swearengen who, however dishonorable, is self-aware in his every manipulation. The bad guy isn’t nearly so black and white.<br />
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If frontier community is a picture of America in the television Western, both Dodge City and Deadwood are presented as largely unsalvageable, but not without conscience. It is each community’s picture of the law which reflects the ethnological perspective of the era in which they were produced. For the Cold War era, Dodge City’s fissures were stitched by an innate trust of governmental authorities and the community’s compliance with containment. This is far from the case in <i>Deadwood</i>’s refraction of a post-9/11 America riven by paranoia and fear that retributive violence turns society into the monster they try to “other”.<br />
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Of both programs’ wide use of Western genre tropes, one of the most consistent portrayals between the two is the picture of the town doctor as its community’s conscience. Both <i>Gunsmoke</i>’s Doc and <i>Deadwood</i>’s Doc Cochran are benevolent figures independent from societal justice. When Doc Cochran says in “Deep Water,” “I see as much misery outta them moving to justify theirselves as them that set out to do harm,” the rift is exposed between these two television Western societies: for a cynical, disillusioned America post-9/11, the lawman isn’t exempt from this caveat. <br />
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<u>Works Cited</u><br />
<br />
“Alarm at Pleasant Valley.” <i>Gunsmoke</i>. CBS. 1 Oct. 1955.<br />
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Barra, Allen. “The Man Who Made ‘<i>Deadwood</i>’.” <i>American Heritage</i> 57.3 (2006): 50-55. Military & Government Collection. Web. 25 Jun. 2014.<br />
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Campbell, D'Ann. <i>Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era</i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.<br />
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Cawelti, John G. <i>The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel</i>. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999.<br />
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“Deep Water.” <i>Deadwood</i>. HBO. 28 Mar. 2004.<br />
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Durham, Christopher Louis. “Masculinity in the Post-War Western: John Wayne and Clint Eastwood”. Diss. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2005. <br />
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Ferro, Marc. <i>Cinema and History</i>. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.<br />
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FitzGerald, Michael R. <i>Native American on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the “Good Indian”</i>. Lantham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.<br />
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Gans, Judith, Elaine M. Replogle, and Daniel J. Tichenor. <i>Debates on U.S. Immigration</i>. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2012.<br />
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“Hotspell.” <i>Gunsmoke</i>. CBS. 17 Dec. 1955.<br />
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MacDonald, J. Fred. <i>Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam</i>. Westport, CT: Praeger. 1985. <br />
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---. <i>Who Shot the Sheriff?: The Rise and Fall of the Television Western</i>. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1987.<br />
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“Mangus.” <i>Gunsmoke</i>. CBS. 24 Dec. 1955.<br />
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Marsden, Michael. “The Making of <i>Gunsmoke</i>: The Writers.” Unpublished paper presented at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association. Atlanta, 5 Apr. 1986.<br />
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May, Elaine T. <i>Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era</i>. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2008.<br />
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McBride, Jeff. “The Man Who Stole His Life.” <i>TV Radio Mirror</i> Jan. 1964: 64.<br />
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Moss, Mark H. <i>The Media and the Models of Masculinity</i>. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2011.<br />
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Newport, Frank. “George W. Bush’s Presidential Career Marked by Highs and Lows.” <i>Gallup Politics</i>. Gallup Inc., 25 Apr. 2013. Web. 23 Jun. 2014. <br />
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O’Connor, John E. and Peter C. Rollins. <i>Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History</i>. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.<br />
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Pye, Douglas. “Introduction: Criticism and the Western.” <i>The Movie Book of the Western</i>. Ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye. London: Studio Vista, 1996. 9-21. <br />
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“The Queue.” <i>Gunsmoke</i>. CBS. 3 Dec. 1955.<br />
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Trimble, Marshall. “Ask the Marshall: How Many Times was Marshal Matt Dillon shot on Gunsmoke?” <i>True West Magazine</i>. True West Mag., 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 15 Jun. 2014.<br />
<br />
Truman, Harry S. “Veto of Bill to Revise the Laws Relating to Immigration, Naturalization, and Nationality.” 25 Jun. 1952. </div>
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-70788554571381077092015-02-07T21:17:00.000-07:002015-02-07T21:56:36.700-07:00My Top 100 Films of the Decade (so far)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-74272326714252145902015-01-29T16:08:00.000-07:002015-01-30T10:23:34.038-07:00My Thirty(one) Most Anticipated Films of 2015<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
Hey, have you guys heard they're making a new <i>Star Wars</i> movie? <br />
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Conventional wisdom dictates that all of the good, award-worthy movies come out at the end of the year while all of the billion-dollar popcorn movies run May-July. Don't get me wrong, I'll consume all of that as well, but it is almost always the films that fall between the cracks that make the biggest impression on me. Here's what I'm most looking forward to as we wave goodbye to the 2014 Oscar™ parade caboose. For a much shorter read, check out a list of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369610/combined">My Wife's Most Anticipated Films of 2015</a>.<br />
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<b>30. <i>White God</i></b> (<i>Fehér Isten</i>) (d. Kornél Mundruczó)<br />
This Hungarian film opened to mixed reviews at Sundance despite winning the Prize Un Certain Regard at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. It looks like a pretty hokey drama but a pretty sweet B-horror. It'll be interesting to see how the two are reconciled.</div>
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<i>U.S. limited release: 27 March 2015</i></div>
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<b>29. <i>Seymour: An Introduction</i></b> (d. Ethan Hawke)</div>
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Another audience favorite (taking second runner-up for the People's Choice Award in Best Documentary at Toronto last fall), Ethan Hawke's examination of concert pianist Seymour Bernstein is hopefully the musical equivalent of <i>Golub</i>.<br />
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<b>28. <i>Mad Max: Fury Road</i></b> (d. George Miller)</div>
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His first non-<i>Happy Feet</i> movie in almost two decades, George Miller's return to roots looks like the best kind of over-the-top, <i>Drive Angry</i>, grindhouse exploitation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>U.S. release: 15 May 2015</i></div>
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<b>27. <i>The Look of Silence</i></b> (d. Joshua Oppenheimer) <o:p></o:p><br />
Danish documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer has won huge accolades on the festival circuit with his sequel to 2012's <i>The Act of Killing</i>. This is sure to be harrowing.</div>
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<i>U.S. limited release: July 2015</i></div>
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<b>26. <i>Ned Rifle</i></b><i> </i>(d. Hal Hartley)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The third, final and-- if it lives up to the hype-- best chapter in Hal Hartley's extended <i>Henry Fool</i> trilogy casts Parker Posey alongside Aubrey Plaza. The film is scheduled for screening at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and will hopefully get a limited U.S. release by the summer.<br />
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<b>25. <i>3 and 1/2 Minutes</i> </b>(d. Marc Silver)<o:p></o:p><br />
On the heels of #blacklivesmatter, Marc Silver's documentary debuts at the Sundance Film Festival and recounts how gun culture and racial bias culminated in the 2012 death of 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. Like last year's <i>Citizenfour</i>, this appears to be a timely, relevant and uncompromising historical document and, hopefully, work of art. </div>
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<b>24. <i>Round Up</i></b> (d. Sufjan Stevens)<o:p></o:p><br />
This is a weird Sufjan Stevens "documentary" that appears to be an environmentalist art installment of a slow-motion rodeo. Maybe this one is only for me, and who knows if I'll ever even be able to see it. <br />
<i>Release: It'll probably show up on Vimeo in like three years.</i></div>
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<b>23. <i>Killers</i></b><i> </i>(d. Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto)<o:p></o:p></div>
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This seems like a crazier (and probably more straight-genre) version of <i>I Saw The Devil</i>. Brutal.<br />
<i>U.S. limited release: 23 January 2015</i></div>
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<b>22. <i>It Follows</i></b> (d. David Robert Mitchell)<o:p></o:p></div>
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This looks like a really stylish genre piece in the vain of <i>Starry Eyes</i> and <i>The Guest</i>. This is the kind of thing that seems fit for VOD nowadays, but I hope I can see this somewhere outside of <a href="http://www.thefilmbarphx.com/">FilmBar</a>. <br />
<i>U.S. limited release: 27 March 2015</i></div>
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<b>21. <i>High-Rise</i></b> (d. Ben Wheatley)<o:p></o:p><br />
The prolific Ben Wheatley has given us <i>Kill List</i>, <i>Sightseers</i> and <i>A Field In England</i> all since 2011. I don't even know what this movie is about; I'll be there.</div>
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<b>20. <i>Mistress America</i></b> (d. Noah Baumbach)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Baumbach has found his muse in Greta Gerwig in what looks like a combination of mumblecore and screwball comedy. #mumblescrew<br />
<i>Release: I'd guess limited late-summer</i><br />
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<b>19. <i>The Witch</i></b> (d. Robert Eggers)<o:p></o:p><br />
Sundance darling that apparently sounds like exactly what it is. You had me at "witch."</div>
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<b>18. <i>Spring</i></b><i> </i>(d. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)<o:p></o:p><br />
In their follow-up to the genre-bending <i>Resolution</i>, Benson and Moorhead return with a "romantic horror" which looks to buck convention while making me real uncomfortable. This is a lot of what I loved about <i>Under the Skin </i>and <i>Trouble Every Day</i>, so I have high hopes for this one.</div>
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<i>U.K. release: 17 April 2015; hopefully U.S. will follow suit</i></div>
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<b>17. <i>Nie yin niang</i></b> (d. Hsiao-Hsien Hou) <o:p></o:p><br />
His first feature since 2007's <i>Flight of the Red Balloon</i>, marking his longest professional hiatus by some distance, this film-- which I know nothing about (including pronunciation)-- is on here by reputation alone. It's currently listed on IMDb as in post-production and sounds like the kind of thing that will debut at Cannes and half of the audience won't be into it. </div>
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<b>16. <i>The Sea of Trees</i></b> (d. Gus Van Sant)<o:p></o:p></div>
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I'm hoping this is Van Sant's return to form (like "Death trilogy" form, not self-congratulatory crowd-pleasing form) in teaming with Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts in something that sounds an awful lot like <i>Gerry</i>. <i>Gerry</i> with trees.<br />
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<b>15. <i>Z for Zachariah</i></b> (d. Craig Zobel) <o:p></o:p><br />
I can't say enough good things about the under-recognized <i>Compliance</i>, but where Zobel turned huge performances from a non-recognizable ensemble cast, his latest currently credits only Margot Robbie, Chris Pine and Chiwetel Ejiofor who are, possibly, the last known survivors on earth. This title may compete on my short list of "favorite Z-titled films" alongside <i>Zelig</i>, <i>Zero for Conduct</i>, <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> and a few <i>Zatoichi</i> pictures.<br />
<i>Danish release: 16 April 2015. Thanks, IMDb.</i><br />
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<b>14. <i>The Duke of Burgundy</i></b> (d. Peter Strickland)<o:p></o:p><br />
Technically, this thing is already out. From the guy who brought us <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i> and the <i>Björk: Biophilia Live</i> concert film, the unofficial prequel to <i>Anchorman</i>. </div>
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<i>U.S. limited release and VOD: 23 January 2015</i></div>
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<b>13. <i>Kamakura Diary</i></b> (<i>Umimachi Diary</i>) (d. Hirokazu Koreeda)<br />
A domestic drama adapted from the manga of the same name, this thing seems to be right up the alley of Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda (<i>Still Life</i>, <i>Nobody Knows</i>). I wouldn't be surprised if this thing debuts at Cannes as it's set to open in Japan a month later.</div>
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<i>Japanese release: 13 June 2015 </i><br />
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<b>12. <i>Love in Khon Kaen</i></b> (d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul) <o:p></o:p></div>
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From Thai director Weeransethakul's website, <i>Love in Khon Kaen</i> "tells of a lonesome middle-age housewife who tends a soldier with sleeping sickness and falls into a hallucination that triggers strange dreams, phantoms, and romance." Sounds par for the course for the guy that brought us <i>Uncle Boonmee</i>.<br />
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<b>11. <i>The Lobster</i></b> (d. Yorgos Lanthimos)<o:p></o:p><br />
From the crazy Greek who brought us <i>Dogtooth</i>, here's hoping that <i>The Lobster</i> follows the recent European arthouse tradition-- alongside <i>Attenberg</i> and <i>Borgman</i>-- of confounding fever dream.</div>
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<i>U.S. limited release: March 2015</i></div>
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<b>10. <i>From the Dark</i></b> (d. Conor McMahon)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Irish creature-feature which casts only two actors. From the director of <i>Stitches.</i><br />
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<b>9. <i>Crimson Peak</i></b> (d. Guillermo del Toro)<o:p></o:p><br />
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"But basically what it is is a really, really, almost classical gothic romance ghost story, but then it has two or three scenes that are really, really disturbing in a very, very modern way. Very, very disturbing, it's a proper R rating. And it's adult."<br />
— Guillermo del Toro</blockquote>
So, basically, <i>Pan's Labyrinth</i> with Jessica Chastain? This could skyrocket close to #2 on my list, but my excitement is tempered by my disinterest in returning to <i>Pacific Rim</i>. </div>
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<i>U.S. release: 16 October 2015</i></div>
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<b>8. <i>Green Room</i></b> (d. Jeremy Saulnier)</div>
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I'm looking for Saulnier to catapult to the forefront of American directors (genre or otherwise) after the exceptional <i>Murder Party</i> and <i>Blue Ruin</i> with this killer tagline: "A young punk rock band find themselves trapped in a secluded venue after stumbling upon a horrific act of violence." Starring Imogen Poots and featuring Patrick Stewart as a Neo-Nazi. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>7. <i>Darkness by Day</i></b> (<i>El día trajo la oscuridad</i>) (d. Martín De Salvo)<br />
I've been excited about this movie since I first heard of its existence and it still has no U.S. distribution. I hope someone picks this up before it hits Latin American torrents.</div>
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<b>6. <i>Yeezus: The Film</i></b> (d. Hype Williams)<o:p></o:p><br />
No one knows anything about this movie, including if it even exists. Kanye released a teaser trailer last February. Expect me to be camping out if this gets a theatrical release.<br />
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<b>5. <i>Tomorrowland</i></b> (d. Brad Bird)<o:p></o:p><br />
The next in the proud tradition of theme-park related films, Brad Bird will again play King Midas to something that would sound like a dumpster fire in anyone else's hands.</div>
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<i>U.S. release: 22 May 2015</i><br />
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<b>4. <i>'71</i></b> (d. Yann Demange)<br />
Full disclosure: I've seen this one and it rules. I don't expect this to play well this side of the Atlantic, but it should further flex Jack O'Connell as an A-list actor where his last few American features let him down.</div>
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<i>U.S. release: 27 February 2015</i></div>
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<b>3. <i>The Hateful Eight</i></b> (d. Quentin Tarantino)<br />
Tarantino continues his foray into historiological metafiction through redemptive violence and blissful cinematic commentary. <i>Inglourious Basterds</i> was no mere <i>Dirty Dozen</i> knock-off, <i>Django Unchained</i> re-Americanized the essence of the spaghetti Western, and we have every reason to believe <i>The Hateful Eight</i> will play genre in a way that pays healthy respect to, but completely transcend expectation and source material of, its <i>Magnificent Seven</i> reference. I mean, look at that poster.</div>
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<i>U.S. release: 13 November 2015</i></div>
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<b>2. <i>Midnight Special</i></b> (d. Jeff Nichols)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Jeff Nichols may very well be the next true American auteur. <i>Midnight Special</i> seems to follow familiar themes in <i>Take Shelter</i> and <i>Mud</i> of the disillusionment of childlike wonder and the seams where the fabric of paternal leadership begins to tear.<br />
<i>U.S. release: 25 November 2015</i></div>
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<b>1. <i>Knight of Cups</i></b> (d. Terrence Malick) / <b><i>Untitled Terrence Malick Project</i></b> (d. Terrence Malick)<o:p></o:p><br />
I'm cheating by ending this list with a twofer, but it is an unprecedentedly exciting place in cinema where the short distance between 2011 and 2015 can produce as many Terrence Malick films as the previous 39 years. <br />
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What do I know about <i>Knight of Cups</i>? Very little. I don't even understand what the title possibly refers to, and I'll keep it this way. Remember when <i>The Tree of Life</i> was coming out and people were touting how it took Malick a long time to balance the harsh representation of fatherhood with the developing technology which made the dinosaurs look legitimate? There was no way to wrap my mind around a statement like that without actually seeing it, and my visceral and emotional connection was heightened by this ignorance. I know Christian Bale is in it. I know Natalie Portman is in it. I know Imogen Poots, Cate Blanchett and Nick Offerman are in it. I know '70s posterboy Ryan O'Neal adds Terrence Malick to his already crowded résumé of New Hollywood directors he's worked with (including Stanley Kubrick, Peter Bogdanovich, Blake Edwards, Norman Mailer, Richard Attenborough). But I'm not convinced any of them could even tell us what it is <i>about</i> at this point.<br />
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I know even less about the second feature. Including its title. I know it has a slightly improved cast (if that can be fathomed) with a few carryovers and I know the two films were shot, more or less, concurrently. Maybe <i>Untitled</i> will come out in 2015? If not, the recent trove of Malick will hold me over for a lifetime. <br />
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I also know <i>To The Wonder</i> is my favorite film of 2013, and I know <i>The Tree of Life</i> is my favorite film of my lifetime. That's all I need to know. By all means, watch the trailer. But I haven't.</div>
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<i>U.S. release: 11 December 2015 (Knight of Cups)</i></div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-11486818652162994242015-01-09T11:15:00.000-07:002015-01-09T14:30:04.415-07:00The 40 Best Films of 2014<div class="MsoNormal">
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What does the cultural barometer tell us about ourselves in
2014? I think our films tell us that we
are resilient. Look at Clint Eastwood’s <i>American Sniper</i> and Angelina Jolie’s <i>Unbroken</i>: these films aren’t Jessica
Chastain crying in the back of a military transport, they’re about heroes doing
heroic, American things. Funny, then,
that the latter is a story of forgiveness that never gets to the forgiving, and
the former is a tale of war-caused PTSD which ends before its real-life
protagonist’s life is cut short by a veteran with PTSD. They’re jingoistic smoke and mirrors with the
guts to only look at the smoke. <br />
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A recurring theme in this year’s films is the uncanny valley: doppelgangers abound, enemies disguised as ourselves, emasculation of
and prescribed heroes and, in the case of Doc Sportello, learning he couldn’t
see the mirrors for the smoke. We need the
movies not for, as Detective Rustin Cohle says, the “transference of fear and
self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel,” but to see what is ugly about
ourselves and why this demands we approach others with grace. This bumper crop projects our lives back upon
us, reminding that sometimes what is hardest to watch is the most necessary. Our resilience was never called into
question, only its cost.<br />
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With no intention of being contrarian, my list avoids the
much fawned-over <i>Boyhood</i>, <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i> and <i>Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue or
Ignorance)</i> and I find much of their praise misguided herd mentality. The best of the three, Richard Linklater’s <i>Boyhood</i> is a hell of a gimmick, but a
gimmick nonetheless and one that would be better served with a more cohesive
through line and character depth. Writer
Guild and ACE editing nominations belittle much of the work on my list which
didn’t have the luxury of twelve years.<br />
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I used to be an unabashed, card-carrying member of the Cult
of Wes Anderson and still hold <i>The Royal
Tenenbaums</i> and <i>The Darjeeling Limited</i>
in my top 100 films of all time. Crushing to me is that, since the naval-gazing
increased with his last two features, he has finally achieved universal
acclaim. His work has become a parody of
itself and leaves me hollow where it was once edifying. The notes are pristine, but they ring
untrue. <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i> is ramshackle, fun and a throwback to
classic screwball comedy—kind of in the same way Woody Allen’s <i>Magic in the Moonlight</i> is a throwback to
classic romantic comedy. One is seen as
a shallow disappointment, one has bloggers lobbying behind it for Best Picture
nominations. Both lie somewhere in the
middle.<br />
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<i>Birdman</i> is another
beast altogether. Perhaps the most
critic-proof of the three, the film attempts to both vilify Hollywood’s
franchise inclination (a lazy critic’s m.o.) and eat its cake too, lecturing a
one-dimensional critic. Embarrassing,
then, that <i>Captain America: The Winter
Soldier</i>, <i>X-Men: Days of Future Past</i>,
<i>Guardians of the Galaxy</i>, <i>Dawn of the Planet of the Apes</i>, and <i>Godzilla</i> are all better and more human
films. The indictment on critical herd
mentality isn’t unfair, only misplaced: the critic’s job is to trace culture’s
de Broglie-Bohm theory. To express what
is objective, in our souls, about the arts.
To expose pretention and put words to the poetic ineffable. <i>Birdman</i>,
as it turns out, is indeed quite effable.
Eff <i>Birdman</i>.<br />
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The punchline is all of this is likely moot as far as the Academy is concerned, for <i>The Imitation Game</i> certainly looks most like a Best Picture™. Kudos for being honest enough among the contenders to eponymously name its feign at art.<br />
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I initially intended to wait to compose my list until <i>A Most Violent Year</i> grew legs into the
Phoenix suburbs. As it turns out, that won’t
be until at least January 23. It is with
a heavy heart that the film joins a short list of contenders which I found no
way to see in 2014: <i>A Girls Walks Home
Alone At Night</i>, <i>National Gallery</i>,
<i>Citizenfour</i>, <i>The World of Kanako</i>, <i>Stray
Dogs</i>, <i>Mommy</i> and three films which
have yet to find distributors: <i>Darkness
by Day</i>, <i>The Vanquishing of the Witch
Baba Yaga</i> and <i>Silvered Water, Syria
Self-Portrait.</i> I hope this working
list is usurped by a few of these in the year to come. Conversely, it was hard to bite my tongue and
leave Yann Demange’s <i>’71</i> off the list
as it is due for U.S. distribution in February.
Even with spots reserved for the possibility of two Terrence Malicks,
it’s assured a top ten finish in 2015.</div>
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<b>40. <i>Night Moves</i></b> (d. Kelly Reichardt)</div>
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A course filter divides the surface from the subtext in the
films of Kelly Reichardt. <i>Night Moves</i> is no exception: though a
fine ecological thriller, the synopsis is hardly what is going on. It presents the means of morality’s slippery
slope to outrageous ends and speaks about what we don’t say to one
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<b>39. <i>Coherence</i></b> (d. James Ward Byrkit)</div>
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Julia Kristeva says in her essay “Powers of Horror” that
fear is processed through the categorization of the abject: “A massive and
sudden emergence of uncanniness … Not me.
Not that. But not nothing,
either. A ‘something’ that I do not
recognize as a thing. A weight of
meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes
me.” I’ll leave it to the reader to
decide why, in a culture of avatar, it is the self which has become abject in a
year of horrific doppelgangers (<i>Enemy</i>,
<i>The Double</i>, <i>The One I Love</i>).</div>
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It seems fitting, then, that <i>Coherence</i> is itself a doppelganger of one of 2013’s best films all
grown up: the Tinder to <i>+1</i>’s
Snapchat. A tense science fiction film
with, remarkably, no special effects.</div>
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<b>38. <i>A Spell to Ward off the Darkness </i></b>(d.
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A matter of personal taste regarding the film's last third kept this documentary from being much higher on my list. Just as (gasp, dare we utter the term "shoegaze") documentary <i>Beautiful Noise</i> and the straightforward newsreel <i>R.E.M. by MTV </i>ended higher than they probably deserved on my list because they spoke to my interests, my dispassion for Scandanavian death metal (in the form of a half-hour one-shot) broke the otherwise effective, philosophical trance the film’s esoterica had on me. This isn't a flaw, per se, but, for a documentary which demands to be approached subjectively, it was a shame that, at least for me, it couldn't sustain its glorious heights. <br />
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<b>37. <i>The Time-Eaters</i> </b>(d. Harry Dodge)</div>
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A Kierkegaardian <i>Before
Sunrise</i> re: hydrophilic chemistry, the cremasteric reflex and pie crusts.</div>
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<b>36. <i>Exhibition</i></b> (d. Joanna Hogg)</div>
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A film of boundaries (wife-husband, body-environment,
interior-exterior), Joanna Hogg’s <i>Exhibition</i>
characterizes architecture and approaches voyeurism as the tensiometer finds
wildly variable measurements on the words between the words.</div>
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<b>35. <i>John Wick</i></b> (d. Chad Stahelski)</div>
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The culmination of two of 2014’s most popular tropes: ‘90s action
revisionism (<i>The Guest</i>, <i>The Raid 2</i>, <i>Edge of Tomorrow</i>,<i> The
Expendables 3</i>) and murdering a dog (<i>The
Babadook</i>, <i>Calvary</i>, <i>Maps to the Stars</i>, <i>Joe</i>, <i>Cheap Thrills</i>) in a
film that would make pre-millennial John Woo proud.</div>
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<b>34. <i>Goodbye to Language</i></b> (d. Jean-Luc
Godard)</div>
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It will certainly take multiple viewings before I’m able to expose
the continental crust of Godard’s narrative of breathtaking imagery, but suffice
to say that one viewing proved there was an unmistakable “there” there. It’s as if the 84-year-young master was able
to reconcile Andrei Tarkovsky’s pathos with Stan Brakhage’s lyricism in an
alternate universe that didn’t end in <a href="http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Brakhage_and_Tarkovsky.html">a temper tantrum</a>.</div>
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<b>33. <i>Foxcatcher</i></b> (d. Bennett Miller)</div>
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Miller follows <i>Moneyball</i>
with another non-sport sports movie about the curios of greatness
(ornithologist), the mechanization of intangibles (philatelist) and the
obsession to please (philanthropist). </div>
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<b>32. <i>We Are The Best! </i></b>(d. Lukas
Moodysson)</div>
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My favorite Moodysson by a country mile, in part because it
doesn’t feel like it has to try so hard to be anti-establishment or paint its
female protagonists wise beyond their years.
Funny, then, that its subject matter is punk rock and joyful empathy. It’s bittersweet in the same mysterious way
that, for me, the distance between <i>Odelay</i>
and <i>Kid A</i> seems like the same lapse
in time between <i>Speakerboxxx/The Love
Below </i>and now despite all quantitative evidence to the contrary. </div>
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<b>31. <i>Calvary</i></b> (d. John Michael McDonagh)</div>
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Dissertations could be written on the metaphor of Father
James’s personification in a post-Christian Ireland, but the film is as
powerful without any theological gymnastics.
A grim, white-knuckle whodunit made all the more harrowing in that our
protagonist knows both his fate and its perpetrator from the inciting
incident. Bleak yet edifying, something
tells me this isn’t the film <i>Noah</i>
detractors were hoping for either.</div>
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<b>30. <i>Starry Eyes</i></b> (d. Kevin Kolsch and
Dennis Widmyer)</div>
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Something I can finally, with no hesitation, thank Chuck
Palahniuk for.</div>
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<b>29. <i>Ernest & Celestine</i></b> (d. Stéphane
Aubier, Vincent Patar and Benjamin Renner)</div>
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If I had a problem with <i>The Lego Movie</i> it was that its message was the anti-Brad Bird: a perpetuation of the myth that it is the ordinary rather than the gifted (<i>The Incredibles</i>) or the disciplined (<i>Ratatouille</i>) that leads to greatness. That the ironic point of "Everything Is Awesome" is lost on America speaks to its failure to deliver a worthwhile message. Again, it's the child who parents the adult.</div>
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<i>Ernest & Celestine</i> certainly<i> feels</i> message-y, but it’s a message the world needs more of: an almost subversive necessitation of otherness for survival rather than hollow self-esteem building.<br />
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<b>28. <i>Noah</i></b> (d. Darren Aronofsky)</div>
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I can’t think of Darren Aronofsky without thinking of the
anecdote Mickey Rourke gave when receiving the Best Actor Independent Spirit
Award for <i>The Wrestler</i> in which
Aronofsky’s response to Rourke’s appraisal that “directors like Darren
Aronofsky come around every 25 years” was “30.”
He is smug, he’s self-righteous, and his intent to piss off certain
people would make him a troll if he weren’t able to put up. <i>Noah</i>
might not have been the film anyone was looking for, but that wasn’t the only
reason I found it edifying: the film is a depiction of, a response to, and an
exercise in grace. What anyone missed
about it was lost in pretext; it took, as Rourke suggested, balls.</div>
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<b>27. <i>Whiplash</i></b> (d. Damien Chazelle)</div>
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<b>26. <i>Cheap Thrills</i></b> (d. E.L. Katz)</div>
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Self-reprobating noir realized as a black comedy and the
remarriage of Pat Healy and Sara Paxton, this is that Quentin Tarantino segment
of <i>Four Rooms</i> ad infinitum. </div>
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<b>25. <i>Too Many Cooks</i></b> (d. Chris “Casper”
Kelly)</div>
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A condensed, Internet-era marriage of Chris Elliott’s
“Action Family” and T.S. Eliot’s <i>The
Wasteland</i> sincere in its meta-irony.
<i>I Am A Strange Loop</i>, indeed.</div>
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<b>24. <i>Cold In July </i></b>(d. Jim Mickle)</div>
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One of my most joyous experiences with a movie this year was
when I entered <i>Cold In July</i> expecting
it to be the sister film to <i>Blue Ruin</i>
only to find the trailer’s entire narrative was over in about twenty
minutes. Unapologetically shaggy dog for
shaggy dog’s sake and a killer supporting cast which, in an ideal world, would
give Oscar nominations to both Sam Shepard and Don Johnson.</div>
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<b>23. <i>Bird People </i></b>(d. Pascale Ferran)</div>
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I absolutely adored how lightly Pascale Ferran tread in her
barely-hemmed joint narrative exploring life’s transience. A perfectly quotidian magic realism.</div>
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<b>22. <i>Mister John </i></b>(d. Joe Lawlor and
Christine Molloy)</div>
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A modern take on Peter Bogdanovich’s <i>Saint Jack</i> stripped of even the ghost of masculine agency. </div>
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<b>21. <i>Gone Girl</i></b> (d. David Fincher)</div>
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Though it’s hard to cleanse a somewhat misogynistic
aftertaste, Fincher’s thriller is sticky and a hell of a lot of fun. The tonal
shifts alone are rapturous. </div>
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<b>20. <i>God Help the Girl </i></b>(d. Stuart
Murdoch)</div>
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I left the theater in September prepared to defend this film
as a guilty pleasure—an easy task considering I’d already been living with the
soundtrack for five years. What I wasn’t
prepared for was the strength and affect as its roots set in. Despite the references in song, <i>God Help the Girl</i> is Murdoch’s most
autobiographically straightforward telling of his struggle with chronic fatigue
syndrome and, with a family member of my own who had the disease rob her of
important young-adult landmarks, Murdoch’s tender obsession with adolescence is
fully realized and recontextualized in a new medium. It’s a joy, and I don’t have to curb that
statement by calling it “amateurish” or “twee.”</div>
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<b>19. <i>Edge of Tomorrow</i></b> (d. Doug Liman)</div>
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So much more than its gimmick (how tedious was every bearing-setting
reiteration at the end of every <i>Memento</i>
chapter? Doesn’t happen here.), who
would have guessed that the indie darling of <i>Swingers</i> and <i>Go</i> would
become Hollywood’s greatest action director?
The high-concept pitch of <i>Groundhog
Day</i> meets <i>Call of Duty </i>is
transcendent. </div>
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<b>18. <i>Godzilla</i></b> (d. Gareth Edwards)</div>
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Though I found his own <i>Monsters</i>
disappointing, Gareth Edwards managed to miraculously deliver everything I
wanted out of Guillermo del Toro’s <i>Pacific
Rim</i>.</div>
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<b>17. <i>The Wind Rises </i></b>(d. Hayao Miyazaki)</div>
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The U.S. release of <i>The
Wind Rises</i> landed after awards season hoopla (February 21), and after Hayao
Miyazaki’s September 2013 announcement that it would be his last directorial
effort. This knowledge made the weight
of melancholy in the film’s last moments two-fold: not only is this a goodbye
to our greatest living animator, but a proudly bittersweet autobiographical
acceptance of a life well spent. </div>
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<b>16. <i>The Raid 2: Berandal</i></b> (d. Gareth
Evans)</div>
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Where <i>The Raid:
Redemption</i> felt like a video game (with its lead literally leveling up and
battling mini-bosses), Evans’s sequel is a different beast entirely. Its convoluted plot is a slow burn over
several years which, when finally injecting the narrative with video game
mini-bosses (Alicia Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man, actual character names),
almost pulls us out of the story. What
delights is the action and choreography shown in a gripping and comprehensible
way: a dying cinematic art.</div>
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<b>15. <i>The Unknown Known </i></b>(d. Errol Morris)</div>
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I regret not having seen the Errol Morris-endorsed <i>Citizenfour</i> and another documentary, <i>National Gallery</i>, which sounds like it
would have made my top five, but it’s no small consolation to see Morris’s take
on another controversial secretary of defense.
Where <i>The Fog of War</i> humanized
Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld exudes a persona of candid delusion. His smugness will frame his chapter in
American history.</div>
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<b>14. <i>The Guest</i></b> (d. Adam Wingard)</div>
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Fear not: where Ti West’s <i>The Sacrament</i> disappointed in 2014—not because of its shift away
from source-respecting exploitation films, but for robbing its audience of the
suspense that made those visceral films joyful—we still have Adam Wingard to
jolt us with surprise within a familiar formula. <i>The
Guest</i> is his best film yet.</div>
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<b>13. <i>Clouds of Sils Maria </i></b>(d. Olivier
Assayas)</div>
Sometimes it takes a film like <i>Clouds of Sils Maria </i>to remind that a film like the critically untouchable and similarly themed <i>Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)</i>'s only attempt toward the Bechdel Test has two women ironically making out with each other. Each film plays on the actor's role as pretend, but only one reminds us how "pretentious" means so much more. The latter makes a show of the high road while cracking low-hanging jokes about Justin Beiber, stage hard-ons and face jism (all of which wasting Zach Galifianakis), the former casts Kristen Stewart alongside Juliette Binoche. <br />
<br />
Of all the accolades surrounding Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone, the real award should go to Lindsay Duncan for scaring critics into failing to expose <i>Birdman</i> for the sham it is. <i>Clouds of Sils Maria</i> is one hundred times the film <i>Birdman</i> is.<br />
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<b>12. <i>Fargo: Series 1</i></b> (d. Adam Bernstein,
Randall Einhorn, Colin Bucksey, Scott Winant and Matt Shakman)</div>
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FX has created a universe where Matin Freeman channels
William H. Macy, Billy Bob Thornton is a captive bolt pistol away from Anton
Chigurh, a small-town bootstrapping magnate gets ransom notes rife with
biblical references and diners advertise specials on White Russians. A life of the Coen mind.</div>
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<b>11. <i>Borgman</i></b> (d. Alex van Warmerdam)</div>
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Fitting nicely on a double-bill with <i>Noah</i>, van Warmerdam’s
horror (maybe?), black comedy (maybe?) reads like a fever dream, exploring the
origins of evil to ambiguous ends. Staking frightening, unstirred ground somewhere between nihilism and moralism, the question of evil is punctuated with random acts of violence and extends, without reason, to young children committing heinous acts. A visceral David Lynch adaptation of Michael Haneke.</div>
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<b>10. <i>Blue Ruin</i></b> (d. Jeremy Saulnier)</div>
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An unapologetic (viz. my favorite kind of) genre piece, <i>Blue Ruin</i> is, obviously, about the pain
and price of revenge. This seems hardly
the point when its pacing and narrative elements are this drum-tight. This is why we go to the movies.</div>
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<b>9. <i>Dawn of the Planet of the Apes</i></b> (d.
Matt Reeves)</div>
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Though never a fan of The Band, “The Weight” seemed to
tenderly re-write itself, creeping into my marriage over the last couple of
years as its own Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
My wife and I turned to each other when it popped up at the perfect
moment in <i>Dawn of the Planet of the Apes</i>. <i>This</i>
was why.</div>
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<b>8. <i>The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears </i></b>(d. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani)</div>
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Following the horror genre on Rotten Tomatoes exposes not
only how off-base the formula is, but how finicky (if not clueless) most
critics are. In 2014, two similarly-themed
and similarly-realized found-footage bigfoot movies were released within a few
months of each other. Bobcat Goldthwait’s
<i>Blair Witch Project</i>-inspired <i>Willow Creek</i> is “certified fresh” with
an 86% approval rating, while Blair Witch Project director Eduardo Sánchez’s <i>Exists</i> boasts a mere 14% splat among
“top critics.” I suspect much of this is
self-congratulatory herd mentality.</div>
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The same herd jumped on the <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i> bandwagon last year despite its
nearly-unapproachable convoluted narrative, but turned on Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s follow up to their well-received <i>Amer</i> as if visceral confoundment—on principle--wasn’t praised in the work of Argento and Antonioni. <i>The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears</i> is an exercise but, like all discipline, it rewarding in the long run. Its dismissal is a double-standard.</div>
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<b>7. <i>Force Majeure </i></b>(d. Ruben Östlund)</div>
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The darkly humorous Swedish cousin to 2012’s <i>The Loneliest Planet</i>, <i>Force Majeure</i>’s structure ups the stakes
by adding the weight of family. Read by
some as an indictment of the upper class, I think that argument misses the
point: the selfishness of Johannes Kuhnke’s Tomas isn’t foreign because of
wealth and we’re not to look down on him because he is (as the original title
suggests) an unwelcome tourist. We are
all tourists on the loneliest planet and, just as the ambiguous ending
suggests, neither gender is sure-footed in their prescribed social roles. I guess it’s the same punchline that “we need
the eggs,” but it sure stings to the point that I’m not sure it’s a joke any
longer.</div>
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<b>6. <i>The Tale of the Princess Kagauya </i></b>(d.
Isao Takahata)</div>
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The heir to the Studio Ghibli throne upon Hayao Miyazaki’s
retirement, Isao Takahata’s first feature since 1999’s <i>My Neighbors the Yamadas</i> is breathtakingly beautiful, profoundly
familial in a way that trumps Pixar’s best, and, again, disappoints at the
Japanese box office. </div>
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<b>5. <i>Only Lovers Left Alive</i></b> (d. Jim
Jarmusch)</div>
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Inherently uncategorizable.
Cool, confident, and self-contained.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOgPZJM6sl_UHeEeJK42igIB-RjX2WTPGjQr6EWNkIJhdPhyE-0JhtHiBgR3FmyKsnHa0Myt2yaoZ1ltWDjcb3I-vrUbNQVuvpV-R7uKPg0c0Mu8YgfPxkGy6xlSRALvoWT3LN9lYOmOY/s1600/True-detective-birds.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOgPZJM6sl_UHeEeJK42igIB-RjX2WTPGjQr6EWNkIJhdPhyE-0JhtHiBgR3FmyKsnHa0Myt2yaoZ1ltWDjcb3I-vrUbNQVuvpV-R7uKPg0c0Mu8YgfPxkGy6xlSRALvoWT3LN9lYOmOY/s1600/True-detective-birds.png" height="358" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>4. <i>True Detective: Series 1 </i></b>(d. Cary
Joji Fukunaga)</div>
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Decorum says this title shouldn’t even be in the running,
but in a year where the French blurred the line between miniseries and film
proper with Bruno Dumont’s <i>P’tit Quinquin</i>
and the U.S. moved closer to the U.K. method of confusing Emmy voters by
producing miniseries as series, it would be wrong to not treat this
self-contained neo-noir contextualizing of themes from <i>The King In Yellow</i> (or Thomas Ligotti for that matter) simply
because it had eight hours with which to do so on premium cable. It was certainly more enthralling and
narratively succinct than the 4+ hours I spent watching <i>Norte, the End of History</i>.</div>
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<b>3. <i>The Strange Little Cat</i></b> (d. Ramon Zürcher)<br />
An unthinkable debut which reads like Jacques Tati adapting Franz Kafka. A cinematic exercise in the creation of memory.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigtvmBesMpx7ZwFThyphenhyphencxhF-z5svGYo5njWTZq6pa34stxmTHisjYHUNOrF9n0U7b01cwKplg1ZDjwAKpnZQmeOAl9JVu5JR7N7UyMu4U9Uir-e7YhO4oQL14-loEqr1lluJ_sE18sj8y8/s1600/inherent-vice-last-supper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigtvmBesMpx7ZwFThyphenhyphencxhF-z5svGYo5njWTZq6pa34stxmTHisjYHUNOrF9n0U7b01cwKplg1ZDjwAKpnZQmeOAl9JVu5JR7N7UyMu4U9Uir-e7YhO4oQL14-loEqr1lluJ_sE18sj8y8/s1600/inherent-vice-last-supper.jpg" height="320" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b>2. <i>Inherent Vice</i></b> (d. Paul Thomas
Anderson)</div>
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Fifty years on, Paul Thomas Anderson picks up the torch to
bring the first Thomas Pynchon adaptation to the screen and, perhaps
unsurprisingly, it becomes the most misunderstood film of the year. Like the Coen Brothers (whose own <i>The Big Lebowski</i> rakes familiar coals of
noir semiotics) who established a strong, niche indie career with self-penned
screenplays, what impresses me most about Anderson’s later work is his flawless
understanding of adaptation: not just of the written word, but of an era. It is cultural commentary on the genre, our
understanding of the medium, or, if you insist, merely pulp: it’s a sticky
gumshoe noir which seeks—perhaps only—to explain itself. This proves to be more than enough.</div>
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<b><i>1. Under The Skin</i></b> (d. Jonathan Glazer)</div>
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As indescribable as it is unshakable, Jonathan Glazer’s
genre-bending horror is the most frightening film since <i>Antichrist</i> and achieves this through similar means: turning the
mirror on humanity in otherworldly fashion.
Like the popularity of 2014’s doppelganger, the abject in <i>Under the Skin</i> takes the form of a
beautiful woman, while approachable humanity is deformed and lacking. Not fair to call her cruel, but calculated, mechanical,
and expressionless in her violence, it is the empathy underscoring her abjection
which haunts me. An unholy combination
of nature and nurture. It subverts cinema's male gaze by literally turning us inside-out.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-40919862669819319672015-01-04T00:56:00.002-07:002015-01-04T01:42:16.771-07:00Best Short Films of 2014Before I wrap my list of favorite films of the year, I thought I'd highlight a few of my favorite short films from 2014. Academy Award nominations will frustrate completists in a couple of weeks and I feel safe in my prediction that, not only will none of these compete for a prize, their online availability proves that (sorry, Academy) the Internet is the most viable medium for the format.<br />
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<b>10. <i>Sean</i> (d. Ryan Reichenfeld)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="209" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112784176?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=ffffff" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/112784176">SEAN</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/ryanreichenfeld">Ryan Reichenfeld</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
<br />
Ryan Reichenfeld of Justin Timberlake music video fame has created an oddly philosophical everyman piece about a teenage Jack In The Box employee from Lake Havasu, Arizona: a naive nihilist in the land of <i>Spring Breakers</i>.<br />
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<b>9. <i>Breathe</i> (d. Laron Murray)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/109455810" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/109455810">Eric Garner BREATHE</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user25149403">Laron Murray</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
<br />
Turning a dying man's pleas into a spoken word call to justice and solidarity, the brevity of Laron Murray's <i>Breathe</i> is harrowingly self-referential.<br />
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<b>8. <i>Are You Okay</i> (d. Bret Easton Ellis)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yBfaPUOQwRA" width="480"></iframe>
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Following the ever-growing trend of blurring the line between short film and music video, Bret Easton Ellis's cut of Dum Dum Girls' "Are You Okay" certainly benefits from one of the finest dream-pop songs of the year and from Dee Dee Penny's long-established persona of grindhouse feminism. (see also Sky Ferreira's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWo7SC-tG4U">"I Blame Myself"</a> with similar bubblegum-goth, L.A. subversion in another of the best music videos of 2014).<br />
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<b>7. <i>Verbatim: What Is A Photocopier?</i> (d. Brett Weiner)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PZbqAMEwtOE" width="480"></iframe>
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Brett Weiner's <i>New York Times</i> Op-Doc is a word-for-word historical recreation highlighting the unintentional humor of legal deposition.<br />
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<b>6. <i>Kid Danny</i> (d. Andrew Cohn)</b><br />
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ESPN's best "30 for 30" short film of the year catches up with Danny Almonte who-- amidst a teenage Miguel Tejada scandal-- threw a perfect game in the 2001 Little League World Series. Typical of the best ESPN films, it is both sappy and redemptive in the best way. <br />
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I've fought with ESPN's video player for the whole year, so it is of no surprise that their embed feature doesn't work now. The film can be viewed <a href="http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=11311860">here</a>.<br />
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<b>5. <i>Jack London's 'A Piece of Steak'</i> (d. Travis Mills)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/85687004" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/85687004">Jack London's A Piece of Steak - Clip - 52 Films in 52 Weeks</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/runningwildfilms">Running Wild Films</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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The pinnacle of Travis Mills's "52 Films in 52 Weeks" project (though closely followed by <i><a href="https://vimeo.com/84441142">Ring Lardner's 'Harmony'</a></i>), the adaptation of <i>Jack London's 'A Piece of Steak'</i> (quotations added to avoid an awkward insult) is a one-man highlight reel put on by Jonathan Medina.<br />
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As the only film on the list not currently available online (I suspect Mills is curbing his proliferation in preparation for his upcoming "Lose Yourself"-moment in his next film, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3717088/combined"><i>Durant's Never Closes</i></a>), keep an eye out as this will be available again at some point in the year.<br />
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<b>4. <i>The Dream</i> (d. Errol Morris)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/aOFyn6pF9qU" width="560"></iframe>
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The best of Errol Morris's trio of Op-Doc "Peace Films," the biographical documentary of Nobel winner Leymah Gbowee avoids schmaltz and approaches profundity.<br />
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<b>3. <i>Gan-Gan</i> (d. Gemma Green-Hope)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/92915163" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/92915163">Gan-Gan</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/gemmagreenhope">Gemma Green-Hope</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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The heir to Joseph Cornell. A Scott Stark contemporary without a shred of pretension.<br />
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<b>2. <i>The Time-Eaters</i> (d. Harry Dodge)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="366" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/88474752" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/88474752">The Time Eaters—Harry Dodge</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user25107749">Futurepoem</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
<b><br /></b>A Kierkegaardian <i>Before Sunrise</i> re: hydrophilic chemistry, the cremasteric reflex and pie crusts. <br />
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<b>1. <i>Too Many Cooks</i> (d. Chris "Casper" Kelly)</b><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QrGrOK8oZG8" width="480"></iframe>
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I initially wrote this off as a clever (and musically brilliant) meta riff until it subverted my expectations so many times I could no longer keep track. There's a serial killer (the only uncredited character) who stands in for us as we demand these characters live out this hell in a piece that finds commonality between "Roseanne" and Lars von Trier's <i>The Kingdom</i>. It's a condensed, Internet-era marriage of Chris Elliott's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dGRBv-js30">"Action Family"</a> and T.S. Eliot's <i>The Wasteland</i> which manages the impossible: it is sincere in its irony.<br />
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It also understands itself to its core: an Adult Swim "infomercial" that I only wish I discovered while awaking from a hangover, on the couch, at 4:30 A.M. I want to meet the person who unknowingly walked into that nightmare. <i>I Am A Strange Loop</i>, indeed. (See also their follow up-- and cousin-- <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8">Unedited Footage of a Bear</a></i>).Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-57610086650826868472014-10-31T11:32:00.000-07:002016-09-28T11:37:21.050-07:0031 Days of Horror (October 2014)<b><br /> Wednesday 1-Oct-14 </b><br />
<div>
Hanyo (1960)</div>
<div>
Silent Hill (2006)</div>
<div>
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)</div>
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<b>Thursday 2-Oct-14 </b><br />
¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (1976)</div>
<div>
The ABCs of Death 2 (2014)</div>
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Dust Devil (1992)</div>
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<b>Friday 3-Oct-14 <br /> </b>Detention (2011)</div>
<div>
Waxworks (1924)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Saturday 4-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Nail Gun Massacre (1985)</div>
<div>
Woodchipper Massacre (1988)</div>
<div>
Baron Blood (1972)</div>
<div>
The Werewolf and the Yeti (1975)</div>
<div>
Beast From Haunted Cave (1959)</div>
<div>
Cannibal Ferox (1981)</div>
<div>
Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)</div>
<div>
Bigger than Life (1956)</div>
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<div>
<b>Sunday 5-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Student Bodies (1981)</div>
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Without Warning (1980)</div>
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20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)</div>
<div>
The Strain: S1E10 Loved Ones (2014)</div>
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The Strain: S1E11 The Third Rail (2014)</div>
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The Strain: S1E12 Last Rites (2014)</div>
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The Strain: S1E13 The Master (2014)<br />
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<b>Monday 6-Oct-14 </b> The Cat and the Canary (1939)</div>
<div>
Critters (1986)</div>
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<b>Tuesday 7-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)<b><br /><br /> </b></div>
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<b>Wednesday 8-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
A Bell from Hell (1973)</div>
<div>
Perfect Blue (1997)<br />
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<b>Thursday 9-Oct-14 </b> The Fourth Man (1983)</div>
<div>
Riget: E3 (1994)</div>
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<b>Friday 10-Oct-14 </b> The Runestone (1991)</div>
<div>
Annabelle (2014)</div>
<div>
Left Behind (2014)</div>
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<b>Saturday 11-Oct-14 </b> Terror at London Bridge (1985)</div>
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The Brood (1979)</div>
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<span style="color: red;">Insomnie (1963)</span></div>
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Santo in the Hotel of Death (1963)</div>
<div>
Alligator (1980)</div>
<div>
House at the End of the Street (2012)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Sunday 12-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Riget: E4 (1994)</div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;">Still Life (2005)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> A Message from Fallujah (2005)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> The Sandman (1991)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> Saw (2003)</span></div>
<div>
Wake in Fright (1971)</div>
<div>
Dressed To Kill (1980)</div>
<div>
The Walking Dead: S5E1 No Sanctuary (2014)</div>
<div>
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)<br />
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<b>Monday 13-Oct-14 </b> The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)</div>
<div>
Tower of London (1962)</div>
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Misterios de ultratumba (1959)</div>
<div>
The State's 43rd Annual All-Star Halloween Special (1995)</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Tuesday 14-Oct-14 </b> Little Shop of Horrors (1986)</div>
<div>
Dog Soldiers (2002)</div>
<div>
Flowers of Flesh and Blood (1985)</div>
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<b>Wednesday 15-Oct-14 </b> Daimajin (1966)</div>
<div>
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)</div>
<div>
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)</div>
<div>
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)</div>
<div>
The Nanny (1965)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Thursday 16-Oct-14 </b> Guinea Pig (1985)</div>
<div>
Tower of London (1939)</div>
<div>
House of Frankenstein (1944)</div>
<div>
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)</div>
<div>
The Hands of Orlac (1924)</div>
<div>
Cheap Thrills (2013)</div>
<div>
Hannibal: S1E1 Apéritif (2013)</div>
<div>
Hannibal: S1E2 Amuse-bouche (2013)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Friday 17-Oct-14 </b><br />
Song at Midnight (1937)</div>
<div>
Mahal (1947)</div>
<div>
The Flesh Eaters (1964)</div>
<div>
Jigoku (1960)</div>
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</div>
<div>
<b>Saturday 18-Oct-14 </b> Guinea Pig 3: He Never Dies (1986)</div>
<div>
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mister Toad (1949)</div>
<div>
From Beyond (1986)</div>
<div>
Castle Freak (1995)</div>
<div>
Dagon (2001)</div>
<div>
Alraune (1928)</div>
<div>
Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Sunday 19-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
The Shining (1980)</div>
<div>
The Night of a Thousand Cats (1972)</div>
<div>
Hostel: Part II (2007)<br />
Lake of the Dead (1958)</div>
<div>
The Chaser (2008)</div>
<div>
Hannibal: S1E3 Potage (2013)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Monday 20-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Magic (1978)</div>
<div>
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968)<br />
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<div>
<b>Tuesday 21-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)</div>
<div>
Hannibal: S1E4 Œuf (2013)</div>
<div>
Hannibal: S1E5 Coquilles (2013)</div>
<div>
The House of Exorcism (1975)<br />
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<div>
<b>Wednesday 22-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Dr. Cyclops (1940)</div>
<div>
Guinea Pig 4: Devil Woman Doctor (1986)<br />
Nightmare (1981)</div>
<div>
Santo in 'The Witches Attack' (1968)</div>
<div>
Hasta el Viento tiene Miedo (1968)</div>
<div>
The Lodger (1944)</div>
<div>
Cat People (1942)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Thursday 23-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Angel Heart (1987)</div>
<div>
Captain America and Santo vs. Spider-man (1973)</div>
<div>
Lizzie Borden Took an Ax (2014)</div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;">Tales from the Crypt: S1E5 Lover Come Hack to Me (1989)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> Tales from the Crypt: S1E6 Collection Completed (1989)</span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Friday 24-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Riget II: E1 Mors in Tabula (1997)</div>
<div>
Riget II: E2 Trækfuglene (1997)</div>
<div>
A Quiet Place in the Country (1968)</div>
<div>
Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)</div>
<div>
Exists (2014)<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Saturday 25-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Sugar Hill (1974)</div>
<div>
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)</div>
<div>
Blackenstein (1973)</div>
<div>
Audrey Rose (1977)</div>
<div>
The Meateater (1979)</div>
<div>
<div>
Basket Case 2 (1990)</div>
<div>
Critters 2 (1988)</div>
<div>
Taste of Fear (1961)</div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Sunday 26-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Alien Autopsy: (Fact or Fiction?) (1995)</div>
<div>
El Espejo de la Bruja (1962)</div>
<div>
House (1986)</div>
<div>
House 2: The Second Story (1987)</div>
<div>
The Oily Maniac (1976)</div>
<div>
Class of Nuke 'Em High Part 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown (1991)</div>
<div>
The Walking Dead: S5E2 Strangers (2014)</div>
<div>
<div>
The Walking Dead: S5E3 Four Walls and a Roof (2014)</div>
</div>
<div>
Dead Set: E1 (2008)</div>
<div>
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Monday 27-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Vampyr (1932)</div>
<div>
Body Melt (1993)</div>
<div>
The Phantom Carriage (1921)</div>
<div>
Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns (2005)</div>
<div>
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)</div>
<div>
Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust (2008)</div>
<div>
The White Reindeer (1952)<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Tuesday 28-Oct-14 </b> Intruder (1989)</div>
<div>
Mogya Agu Fam (2011)</div>
<div>
This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)</div>
<div>
Masters of Horror: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005)</div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> Tales from the Crypt: S5E1 Death of Some Salesmen (1993)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> Tales from the Crypt: S5E2 As Ye Sow (1993)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> Tales from the Crypt: S5E3 Forever Ambergris (1993)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="color: red;"> Tales from the Crypt: S5E4 Food for Thought (1993)</span></div>
<div>
V/H/S: Viral (2014)</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<b>Wednesday 29-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Excision (2012)</div>
<div>
Tesis (1996)</div>
<div>
Murder Party (2007)</div>
<div>
The Possession (2012)</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<b>Thursday 30-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
The Stuff (1985)</div>
<div>
Guinea Pig 5: Android of Notre Dame (1989)</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<b>Friday 31-Oct-14 </b></div>
<div>
Chopping Mall (1986)</div>
<div>
The House that Dripped Blood (1971)</div>
<div>
The People Under the Stairs (1991)</div>
<div>
Critters 3 (1991)</div>
<div>
The Ghost of Rashmon Hall (1947)</div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-15649372319081212602014-08-22T16:18:00.001-07:002014-08-22T16:43:16.974-07:00The Golden Age to the New Hollywood Era: Hollywood post-World War II<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Hollywood’s Golden Age—an era bookended by the christening of sound motion pictures and the Supreme Court’s anti-trust verdict in <i>United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. </i>—was a time of vast proliferation in terms of studio output and tremendous profit for a handful of vertically-integrated production companies who dominated the market. Even if per capita attendance never again reached the heights of the silent era (Pautz 83), the coincidence of monopolistic business practices and the prominence of cinema as the dominant form of media ensured that the Golden Age was the industry’s most profitable era (Dirks).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjmdm8cYxpSJj0vmxhDSgdo9Juvx_jb6wbSvlk74Tgqq3zDSBdKV1ebEqEb8a3mJa9q4P4ddYFcdWuDwwUD6Ba5oXqcyRuT19yvR3-mNu_feXfyxJsWBP1HXlgzR_ylmXLB2Qcg2BDurk/s1600/Percentage_of_the_US_Population_that_went_to_the_Cinema_on_Average,_Weekly,_1930-2000.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjmdm8cYxpSJj0vmxhDSgdo9Juvx_jb6wbSvlk74Tgqq3zDSBdKV1ebEqEb8a3mJa9q4P4ddYFcdWuDwwUD6Ba5oXqcyRuT19yvR3-mNu_feXfyxJsWBP1HXlgzR_ylmXLB2Qcg2BDurk/s1600/Percentage_of_the_US_Population_that_went_to_the_Cinema_on_Average,_Weekly,_1930-2000.png" height="296" width="640" /></a></div>
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The fallout from the Paramount Decision necessitated change in theatrical exhibition and, as television began to replace the cinema as the dominant form of media, the Hollywood film industry was strong-armed into diversification. The Big Five and Little Three (who dominated as much as 99% of the annual movie market share in 1964) caved to media conglomeration for capital but saw their market shares consistently drop throughout the New Hollywood Era (Finler 40). This era saw Hollywood engage new practices in business and aesthetics partly in response to legislation (both theatrical exhibition and decency regulations changed due to the Supreme Court’s Paramount Decision and its overturning of its 1915 <i>Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio</i> ruling in 1952, respectively), but mostly to jockey for competitive edge. If cinema was to no longer be the dominant media platform, deviation from the Classical Hollywood Style in terms of content, form and business practice would vie to get audiences back in seats and to obtain fragmented pieces of the leisure dollar as modes of exhibition evolved.<br />
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The ramifications of the Paramount Decision are what ultimately changed the course of the Hollywood industry forever. The Golden Age of Hollywood was so prolific and profitable because of the stranglehold a handful of studios had on the production, distribution and exhibition arms of the industry. In 1948, the Supreme Court found the eight Hollywood production studios “conspired to and did restrain and monopolize interstate trade in the exhibition of motion pictures…and that their combination of producing, distributing and exhibiting motion pictures violated §§ 1 and 2 of the [Sherman] Act” (<i>United States v. Paramount Pictures</i> 131). This conspiracy demanded exhibition houses charge minimal admission prices, elevating quantity over quality. </div>
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A significant portion of income for Production houses during the Studio Era came from block-booked lineups and major studios created B-movie units to round out pre-sold double bills with low-budget productions. As Hollywood studios retained the rights to production and distribution but no longer had control of exhibition, B-movies decreased in value. Exhibition houses demanded films of higher quality and B-units from the major studios were phased out. Production values (and costs) increased as a result of more discriminatory booking and the prolific number of Hollywood films (many of which, B-movies) produced during the Golden Age quickly dropped.<br />
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To capitalize on their smaller number of films, production companies began to distribute their big budget films through roadshow exhibition, protecting their assets by moving away from long-term contracts with movie houses. Studios travelled their elite programming and charged higher rental fees to independent theaters who, in turn, charged more per ticket for big-budget productions. Pouring huge budgets into roadshow features proved to be a gamble for production studios; while 20th Century Fox’s extravagant <i>The Sound of Music</i> surpassed <i>Gone with the Wind</i> as the all-time rental leader in 1965, the production costs of <i>Cleopatra</i> almost bankrupted the studio two years earlier despite being the highest grossing film of the year (Hefferman 424). This would not be an isolated event. Roadshow features were culturally safe (often historic, biblical or literary) to appeal to large audiences, epic in scope to present an awesome spectacle television couldn’t provide, but extravagantly—sometimes irreparably—expensive. <br />
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Higher rental prices may have, for studios, offset the loss from producing fewer films, but exhibitors had to innovate new strategies to fill seats as attendance declined into the 1950s. The advent of drive-in theaters captured new youth and family-oriented baby-boom markets, particularly in rural and suburban areas. Though something of a novelty, the drive-in created a new experience which juxtaposed the intimacy of a car’s private space with the camaraderie and spectacle of public entertainment. Films even became secondary as some drive-ins featured shuffleboard, miniature golf and dine-in areas. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pre-show drive-in shuffleboard</td></tr>
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Inner-city theaters—once the hub of cinema in the Golden Era—struggled as “confiscatory rentals and extended first runs in large suburban theaters meant that last season’s hits began their subsequent runs in the inner city virtually played out” (Hefferman 419). These exhibitors stayed afloat by targeting specific audiences with their programming: they reran kiddie fare, played niche sci-fi and horror films to a growing cult of genre, and even targeted its ethnic crowd with social problem pictures (Hefferman 419). Niche programming became key for several small and second-run theaters and, although the Paramount Decision freed exhibitors from studio pricing, it wasn’t until another Supreme Court decision came in 1952 that exhibitors could take advantage of a new trend in foreign and independent cinema as the loosening of the Production Code made such a cinema of attractions possible.</div>
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The second Supreme Court decision that forever tousled the Hollywood industry as it moved toward the New Hollywood Era was the 1952 overturning of its initial ruling on 1915’s <i>Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio</i>. In order to consolidate concerns of state-mandated censorship boards following the 1915 ruling that denied the extension of First Amendment rights to motion pictures, and to repair a poor public image of Hollywood lasciviousness due to off-screen scandal, Hollywood executives forged a trade association to protect its economic interests. In 1922, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America began work on a Production Code which went into effect in 1930 and ran through Hollywood’s Golden Age. This self-policing found Hollywood studios willing to abide by zealous mandates against portrayals of miscegenation or sexual inference to prevent a bad apple from spoiling the bunch.<br />
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The Production Code prevented any major studio from exploiting indecency in an effort to elevate the cinema as legitimate in the public eye and, with vertical integration still intact, the Code was “enforceable because of the lock the five majors had on first-run exhibition. Film lacking a Code seal could not play in affiliated theaters. Barred from the lucrative first-run market, it was economic suicide for the majors to make films that would not be granted Code approval” (Schaefer 381-2). The Production Code was, therefore, more a matter of economic security than morality; studios abided by the rules to jibe with exhibition as well as to guard the public perception of trade credibility. <br />
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However, the judicial stance on decency changed, coinciding with the Paramount Decision. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas stated in 1948, “‘we have no doubt that moving pictures, like newspapers and radio, are included in the press whose freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment,’ opening the door for a challenge to motion-picture censorship” (Schaefer 382). This challenge would come four years later in the case of <i>Burstyn v. Wilson</i> which overruled 1915’s Mutual Decision, defanged the Legion of Decency and allowed theaters—now unbound by monopolistic tendencies—the freedom to exhibit edgier foreign and independent films without a Production seal.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack Valenti, MPAA President 1966-2004</td></tr>
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With the Production Code increasingly difficult to enforce, censorship growing passé with evolving cultural mores, and new art-house and genre audiences to exploit, the major studios reframed regulation in the form of the MPAA rating system to again protect their economic advantage. A statement by MPAA president Jack Valenti in 1968 (the same year the new rating system went into effect) does rhetorical work in distancing the stance of the production studios from the now culturally unpopular connotation of “censorship” while preemptively self-policing to avoid government intervention. Valenti asks, “Can censorship cure the portrayal of violence in the media? …I would have a larger question. I would ask: Can censorship curb violence in the society? I think it’s a truism that movies are not beacons but rather mirrors of society” (Valenti 71). That is to say, censorship under the Production Code did not cure societal ills, but the new market could be legitimized. The resulting MPAA ratings system was the best of both worlds for the production studios: the R rating allowed grittier content forbidden on television and “became a gateway to the legitimate film marketplace: a code of production, distribution, and exhibition serving the major players in the industry” (Sandler 258). Just as it would have been “economic suicide” to release a film without the Production seal during the Studio Era, the MPAA phased out their X rating—bowing instead to censorship—to avoid legal injunctions preventing exhibition. The MPAA’s X rating would become New Hollywood’s economic suicide, while the legitimized R rating would become immensely profitable as it allowed for thematic and formal variations on the Classical Hollywood Style.<br />
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As exhibition increased its independent and foreign fare, and the MPAA legitimized boundary-pushing content with its R rating, the Hollywood industry saw audiences return as they altered thematic and formal content. <i>The Godfather</i> was one such success story which was “a critical and commercial smash with widespread appeal, drawing art cinema connoisseurs and disaffected youth as well as mainstream moviegoers,” pulling audiences away from their televisions and correcting a 7-year skid in box-office attendance (Schatz 292). What this statement presupposes is that, though the narrative tendencies for films which would come to be known as “blockbusters” were always at the forefront of studio concerns, art-house crowds and “disaffected youth” were significant audiences to consider. The success of <i>The Graduate</i>, <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i> and <i>Easy Rider</i> in the late 1960s indicated to studios that genre revisionism with auteurist sensibilities could be profitable despite their shift from the Classical Style (Grainge 409). Though films of the Studio Era often had a distinct house style, directors—considered employees rather than artists—perpetuated an invisible style in both sound and visuals. As studios began to terminate long-term staff contracts following the Paramount Decision, it also grew increasingly difficult for a director to retain familial crews to develop a singular look. Films of the Classical Hollywood Style were, therefore, enterprisingly corporate and stylistically invisible.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Cassavetes directing <i>Faces</i> with hand-held camera</td></tr>
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The curio that was art-house cinema along with disaffected youth receipts led studio executives to take a gamble on the auteuristic tendencies of New Hollywood directors. Many of these directors employed distinct visual style and reflexive genre play which ran contrarian to Classic Hollywood invisibility. Robert Altman innovated overlapping dialogue through use of multi-track mixers, John Cassavetes experimented with handheld cameras, long takes and deliberate pacing and Woody Allen authored films of non-linear narrative, all on the studio dime. Where deviations from the Classic Style toward the end of the Studio Era came in the form of novelty to rival television viewership (the inherent reflexivity of CinemaScope and 3D), reflexive tendencies in the New Hollywood Era were framed as singular, artistic visions.<br />
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The profitability of the auteur style, however, was unsustainable despite the promise of a “new cinema” that came with corporate conglomeration at the end of the Studio Era. Horizontal integration would encourage the prominence of the blockbuster as synergistic output could incorporate returns throughout a wider media spectrum. Certainly studio executive always preferred homogenized entertainment in times of economic depression. Declining attendance in the 1950s encouraged safe, pre-sold releases and epics and musicals from pre-existing material dominated the box-office throughout the decade. Strangely enough, when the majors began being absorbed into corporate conglomeration—beginning with MCA’s takeover of Universal Pictures in 1962 during another studio depression—low-risk homogeny wasn’t their primary concern.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Cimino amid shooting one-million feet of film for <i>Heaven's Gate</i></td></tr>
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In an attempt to reach a youthful audience with youthful leadership, the media conglomerates largely replaced studio dinosaurs with “brats” who also saw promise in the art-house and disaffected youth crowds. Noel King describes this New Hollywood as “a brief window of opportunity…when an adventurous new cinema emerged, linking traditions of classical Hollywood genre filmmaking with the stylistic innovations of European art cinema” (268). Such adventure from a wider pool of resources would also bankroll such big-budget auteur flops as William Friedkin’s <i>Sorcerer</i> in 1977 and Michael Cimino’s <i>Heaven’s Gate</i> in 1980—the latter bankrupting United Artists—to increased studio anxiety. Even “brats” like Francis Ford Coppola whose prior work had been highly successful at the box-office saw their directorial power fade. Much like the industry’s treatment of Orson Welles at the height of the Studio Era, the New Hollywood Era saw the climate grow tenuous between single-minded directors and big business.<br />
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Screenwriter William Goldman summed up the corporatization of the film industry by saying, “Most of the studio guys I’ve met are really smart, but they don’t care much about the movies. As slots, yes. As merchandising tie-ins,—oh my—yes. As theme-park rides, you betcha! And that’s the problem. They are mostly ex-agents or business school types. They care about slots and profits and product and Burger King cross-promotions” (King 271). On the surface, this is undeniably true: the entrenching of the high-concept blockbuster demands larger budgets to films of broad appeal with the promise of large returns across multiple outlets through horizontal integration and cross-promotion. The fallacy of Goldman’s quip is the presupposition that “film as film” has ever been a primary motivating concern among studio executives.<br />
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The Studio Era’s vertically-integrated control of exhibition and its shift to roadshow distribution weren’t about “film” any more than the Production Code (or subsequent MPAA rating system) was about morality. Blockbuster films of the New Hollywood Era may be high-concept and pre-sold (like the adapted epics of the 1950s), but they aren’t diametrically opposed to auteur cinema of the late-’60s and early-’70s: both were considered low-risk in their time and exploited a welcoming demographic. The diversification of media left the film industry with no choice but to invite corporate conglomeration. Legislation pulled the rug from their monopolistic strength in Hollywood’s Golden Age, and the competition for post-World War II leisure dollars made it impossible for the industry to sustain itself as it had at the beginning of the Studio Era when, in 1929, it earned 83 cents of every entertainment dollar spent in America (Mintz). As public consumption of media evolved, Hollywood diversified its market into the New Hollywood Era. Any industry concern for “film as film” cannot be divorced from the shrewd economic practices which define its history.<br />
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<u>Works Cited</u><br />
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Dirks, Tim. “The History of Film: The 1940s.” <i>Filmsite</i>. AMC Networks, LLC., n.d. Web. 9 Aug. 2014.<br />
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Finler, Joel Waldo. <i>The Hollywood Story</i>. London: Wallflower Press, 2003.<br />
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Hefferman, Kevin. “Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead (1968).” <i>Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader</i>. Ed. Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 418-434.<br />
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Grainge, Paul, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith. <i>Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader</i>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.<br />
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King, Noel. “‘The Last Good Time We Ever Had’: Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema.” <i>Hollywood Film History</i>. Ed. Kevin Sandler. New York: Pearson, 2009. 267-278.<br />
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Mintz, Steven and Sara G. McNeill. “The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture.” <i>Digital History</i>. Digital History, 2013. Web. 11 Aug. 2014.<br />
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Pautz, Michelle. “The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance: 1930-2000.” <i>Issues in Political Economy</i>, Vol. 11 (2002): 70-87. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.<br />
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Sandler, Kevin S. “CARA and the Emergence of Responsible Entertainment.” <i>Hollywood Film History</i>. Ed. Kevin Sandler. New York: Pearson, 2009. 267-278.. 249-264.<br />
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Schaefer, Eric. “The End of Classical Exploitation” <i>Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader</i>. Ed. Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 380-391.<br />
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Schatz, Thomas. “The New Hollywood.” <i>Hollywood Film History</i>. Ed. Kevin Sandler. New York: Pearson, 2009. 287-306.<br />
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<i>United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.</i> 334 U.S. 131. 131-180. No. 79. US Supreme Court. 1948. Web. (9 Aug. 2014).<br />
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Valenti, Jack. “The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.” <i>Screening Violence</i>. Ed. Stephen Prince. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 62-75.</div>
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-56607632666438565762014-07-22T11:31:00.000-07:002014-07-22T11:31:24.172-07:00From Silent to Sound: Hollywood 1927-1931<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Slapstick auteur Charlie Chaplin seems to inform the opinion of many film historians that the ushering in of Hollywood’s sound era was more of an end than a beginning. Douglas Gomery describes the shift as “tainted by an overlay of sadness in that Hollywood has been seen as preventing what might have been—a group of progressive filmmakers serving a working-class audience—adopting instead an overt profit-maximizing structure” (“Hollywood” 20). </div>
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To Chaplin, a silent innovator who largely refused change (releasing both <i>City Lights </i>[1931] and <i>Modern Times</i> [1936] as essentially silent films in the sound era), the demise of the silent era was even more melancholy: “just when they perfected it, he said, it was all over” (Bogdanovich). Indeed, in terms of business practices, the introduction of sound strengthened the oligopoly, putting box-office revenue into even fewer hands through the Great Depression. However, although their product suffered in the early sound years as filmmakers needed to develop the technology and create a new visual language, sound film has endured not merely as a for-profit venture, but because it found powerful ways to integrate what was always a part of the theater-going experience into a new art form. </div>
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When Al Jolson pronounced “you ain’t heard nothin’ yet” in 1927’s <i>The Jazz Singer</i>, synchronous sound must have looked like another spectacle of attraction used by cinema since its penny arcade days. And, initially, a successful spectacle too: “attendance figures moved upward slightly when sound first took over, but the numbers radically dropped within the first eighteen months, and they’ve been dropping ever since” (Bogdanovich). Of course, in the era of the vertically-integrated system, overall attendance figures aren’t as important to production companies so long as their own seats are being filled. </div>
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Sound became an expensive tool for the major studios to tighten their stranglehold on production, distribution and exhibition. Gomery says, “the popularity of the talkies enabled new companies such as Warner Bros. to rise to power and join the small list of major studios including Paramount, Loew’s, and other powerful corporations of the silent era, which not only retained but increased their power” (“Hollywood” 20-21). So it was business as usual for the major studios even if, in many cases, their casts of stars required some tweaking.</div>
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The sound era wasn’t kind, as many Hollywood stars found it difficult to make the transition from pantomime to dialogue, but audiences approached star vehicles in much the same way they always had. When audiences had to adapt from the cinematic length of shorts to features, Paul Grainge says, “audience concentration spans would stretch … in direct correlation with their worshipping of stars” (Grainge 93). The idolization of John Barrymore, Greta Garbo and Douglas Fairbanks was analogous to that of Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, only with additional sensory stimulation. The biggest studios protected their assets by holding large “stables” of actors under contract through the studio era. <br />
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However, if overall attendance diminished in the sound era, it’s likely due to how both audience experience of the theater space changed with the advent of sound and how this business model from the big companies limited opportunities for independents. As cinemas came into their own in the 1920s, “vaudeville acts and popular singers entertaining audiences while a reel was changed gave way to orchestras and Wurlitzer organs. Sound effect machines such as the Kinematophone became popular before up-market theaters began to expect specially prepared scores to accompany each film” (Grainge 96).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Balaban & Katz's The Chicago Theater (c. 1921)</td></tr>
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Silent film was never silent, it was always accompanied with music from anything between extravagant orchestras in the largest chain theaters to pianolas at second-run theaters. Audiences went to the movies to be entertained, but not just by the film itself. In his analysis of a large, independent chain theater in the 1920s, Gomery states, “remarkably, one of the variables that did <i>not</i> count in Balaban & Katz’s rise to power and control was the movies themselves. Indeed, the company grew and prospered despite having little access to Hollywood’s top films” (“Rise” 105).<br />
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The cinema was a new form of entertainment accessible to the working-class, and it stands to reason that the sustained success of silent films (especially within the context of falling attendance of the sound era) had to do with not only the gala atmosphere of the biggest theaters, but the performance aspect in cheap second-run theaters. Mark Jancovich suggests that audiences weren’t initially smitten with synchronous sound pictures because silent “film showings were still associated with the presence of live music” (Jancovich 162). <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">American Federation of Musicians ad, Portsmouth Herald, 1 Oct. 1930</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">American Federation of Musicians ad, Syracuse Herald, 2 Sept. 1930</td></tr>
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Not only did the introduction of sound to motion pictures leave many local musicians and vaudeville acts without work, the cost of upgrading synchronous sound equipment was often too much for smaller, independent theaters. If independents like Balaban & Katz could be highly successful without screening Hollywood’s major films, the major production studios found a way, with the advent of sound, to bolster their product by offering no alternative.<br />
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Vertically-integrated studios had the initial capital to pour into upgrading their theaters to be equipped with sound and, when they began to only produce sound films, independents and second-run theaters had a difficult time keeping up. “In many rural areas, cinemas closed and those cinemas that did stay open changed their practices,” meaning service took a back seat to concessions, and live entertainment was sacrificed to upgrade to sound equipment (Grainge 189). The business behind the transition to the sound era meant more than mere equipment, it changed the way American audiences experienced the theater. As the Depression waged on, the sound era took away from working-class audiences the appearance of luxury and live entertainment in exchange for talkies and popcorn. Total attendance may have decreased, but the “big five” ensured that the remaining attendees were in their seats. <br />
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Yet not everyone on the major studios’ payrolls was happy with the change. Sound film brought with it an aesthetic shift which, arguably, detracted from film’s artistry. Alfred Hitchcock lamented that “silent pictures were the purest form of cinema,” and the aesthetic montage innovations of artists like D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein support this theory (Chapman 93). A visual medium for which D.W. Griffith laid the groundwork, narrative silent film was “constructed through parallel editing … consist[ing] of shots of two or more separate but usually parallel locations interwoven to advance the film’s plot” (Bernardi 32). Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein extended the art of montage, proving silent film to be a new diegesis of lyricism, movement, attraction and narrative.<br />
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Donald Crafton says of Eisenstein that in, “probably referring to [Chaplin’s] <i>The Kid</i> (1921) he notes that the lyrical may coexist with the disruptive attraction” (Crafton 64). In furthering the discussion of how to understand this filmic language, Tom Gunning adds in his response to Crafton, “Eisenstein called … for a montage of attraction, and noted that, in this structure, elements of narrative could be introduced in such a way as to lose their usual claim to coherence and diegetic realism” (Gunning 73). Expressive pantomime acting, variations of shot length and juxtapositional montage allowed silent filmmakers to create a sophisticated visual language which could stimulate emotions and ideas. This language was raised to high artistry, but montage changed when sound took over. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Seventh Heaven</i> (1927)</td></tr>
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Coincidently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held their first Academy Awards presentation in 1929, the last year that silent pictures would be prominent in future Hollywood productions. F.W. Murnau’s <i>Sunrise</i> was presented with an award for “Unique and Artistic Production” in, tellingly, the only year it was ever awarded. Frank Borzage was presented the “Best Director, Dramatic Picture” award for his work on the silent feature <i>Seventh Heaven</i>, capping his tremendous run of moving, artistic silent romances (including <i>Street Angel</i> [1928] and <i>Lucky Star</i> [1929]). Two of the most artistically adventurous directors of their day, Murnau and Borzage advanced the language of silent film at Fox. These pictures are rich in the Kierkegaardian artistic virtues: the aesthetic, the moral, the religious and the dramatic. Borzage and Murnau were recognized within the industry as important film artists of their day and their silent pictures are considered canonical today. <br />
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Yet the lyricism these directors achieved through cross-cutting, expressive acting and mise-en-scene diminished in the early years of sound film. Borzage’s first sound film, <i>They Had To See Paris</i> (1929), feels clunky and uninspired compared to his string of silents for Fox. Takes are longer and more static, the pace is slowed due to the tempo of dialogue, and the compensational reframing and panning feel jarring. The early years of sound film treated dialogue as a gimmick rather than integrating it into the art form cinema had already established and, with the possible exception of Ernst Lubitsch, it took a number of years for even the most artistically recognized directors to recreate the graceful language cinema once had. These same years were needed for technology to advance in a way that allowed for camera and actor movement to be fluid with synchronous sound: <i>They Had To See Paris</i> also suffers—like many early sound features—as its acting is forcedly stiff, its characters talking at a microphone. The artistry of cinema may not have been “all over” as Chaplin rued, but the early years of sound film were a step back in terms of artistry.<br />
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However, if early sound films lacked a certain visual artistry in its early years, it advanced much of the work it was already doing in terms of creating an invisible narrative style that incorporated music. Silent film had already moved in its early decades from a style of cinéma vérité to that of narrative character subjectivity. Grainge said of the evolution of silent film, “initially placed before the shot in which dialogue took place, it became common for intertitles to come just after the character had begun to speak. This further enhanced the development of character subjectivity, the responsibility of narration transferring from the third person of the expository titles to the dialogue titles of individual characters” (Grainge 29-30). The transition to sound made this even more effective, as voice intonation became synonymous with character and took away the reflexivity caused by intertitles. <br />
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Furthermore, the music itself made sound features a more unified artistic product. Silent film is something of a misnomer as music was always performed alongside screenings. What synchronous sound allowed in the moving picture was not only incidental sound within the world of the narrative, but invisible score which could stimulate emotion in a very calculated fashion. The transition to sound “led to the development of non-diegetic musical scores, or the addition of music that was not supposed to represent sounds actually heard within the world of the film but rather acts as an interpretation of the action, implying menace, action or tragedy” (Grainge 188). The silent era saw scores being produced for movie-house orchestras for a cohesive dramatic experience, but the sound feature incorporated these elements into a single, unalterable unit. Such unity contributed to the strength of Hollywood’s invisible style as the music became less performance and more about influencing mood. <br />
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The transition to sound certainly changed audiences’ cinematic experience at the beginning of the 1930s. Major studios tightened their grip on the types of movies being made and where and how they would be shown. Luxurious, independent theaters were hurt not only by the Great Depression, but by the expense required for the new technological upgrade. Audiences had their options limited; not only did major studios help ensure their top product would be seen, second-run theaters and independents had trouble keeping up with the service and experience the theater once provided.<br />
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Artistry also took a back seat as top directors experienced a rough learning curve for both cinematic language and technology and, although new invisible camera methods were innovated, dialogue largely replaced Eisensteinian montage as a form of cinematic language. Yet sound proved to be more than a middling gimmick; music moved from orchestral and mediated to integrated and invisible contributing, just as spoken dialogue would, to the invisibility of Hollywood’s narrative style. Hollywood may have sacrificed some of its complex visual language with the coming of the sound era, but its tendency to invisible narrative structure grew stronger with the coming of sound. <br />
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<u>Works Cited</u><br />
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Bernardi, Daniel. “The Birth of a Nation (1915): Integrating Race into the Narrator System.” <i>Hollywood Film History</i>. Ed. Kevin Sandler. New York: Pearson, 2009. 29-36.<br />
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Bogdanovich, Peter. “1928: The Last and Greatest Year of the Original Motion Picture Art, B.S. (Before Sound).” <i>Blogdanovich</i>. IndieWire, 30 Jan. 2011. Web. 19 Jul. 2014. <br />
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Chapman, James. <i>Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present</i>. London: Reaktion Books, 2003. <br />
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Crafton, Donald. “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy.” <i>Hollywood Film History</i>. Ed. Kevin Sandler. New York: Pearson, 2009. 61-71. <br />
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Gomery, Douglas. “Hollywood as Industry.” <i>American Cinema and Hollywood: Critical Approaches</i>. Ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 19-28. <br />
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Gomery, Douglas. “The Rise of National Theatre Chains.” <i>Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader</i>. Ed. Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 103-119. <br />
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Grainge, Paul, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith. <i>Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader</i>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. <br />
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Gunning, Tom. “Response to ‘Pie and Chase’.” <i>Hollywood Film History</i>. Ed. Kevin Sandler. New York: Pearson, 2009. 72-73. </div>
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Jancovich, Mark and Lucy Faire. “Translating the Talkies: Diffusion, Reception and Live Performance.” <i>Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader</i>. Ed. Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 156-16<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">4.</span></div>
Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-74216640022169101602014-07-11T11:27:00.002-07:002014-07-11T11:28:41.941-07:00Jason Goes to Production Hell: The Making of Freddy vs. Jason<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Film producer Gary Sales sums up the allure behind—and the success often had in—making cheap, exploitation films in a 1982 interview with <i>Variety</i>. He explains his commercial success with slasher films of the era saying, “we realized that you need a product for which there is a ready-made market” (“Horror Pics” 20). Though strictly formulaic, the teen slasher films of the 1980s proved that the genre film can be produced economically and rake in profits. Few franchises understood this better than Paramount Pictures’ <i>Friday the 13th </i>series and New Line Cinema’s <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i>: the former saw a worldwide box-office gross of over $226m from eight films in the 1980s with a combined production budget of $19.9m (Bracke 314-315),; the latter grossed nearly $172m from five films throughout the decade on a budget $28.8m, earning a deficient New Line Cinema the nickname “the house that Freddy built” (<i>The House that Freddy Built</i>).<br />
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The overwhelming franchise success is almost exclusively due to their iconographic villains, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger and, as devoted fanbases financed the sequels, the concept of a crossover film began gestating in the late 1980s. After fifteen years of rumors, copyright exchanges, restructured production staffs, seventeen solicited scripts and massive rewrites, <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> hit theaters in 2003 and became the highest grossing installment for either franchise.<br />
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The idea for a crossover film was not a new one. According to former Co-chairman and CEO of New Line Cinema, Robert Shaye, “Paramount did, at one point [in the late 1980s], approach us with the idea of doing a Freddy and Jason movie. But they basically wanted what we wanted—to license them the rights to Freddy Krueger and go off and make their own movie, which we were not anxious to do” (“Genesis”). By the early 1990s, both franchises had waned in popularity and, following unsuccessful short-lived anthology television spin-offs, Paramount Pictures gave up their distribution rights to the <i>Friday the 13th</i> franchise. Creator and director of the first <i>Friday the 13th</i> film, Sean S. Cunningham states that by 1991 he “reapproached Phil Scuderi [to whom rights reverted after <i>Jason Takes Manhattan</i>] and the original backers from Boston about getting the rights back to <i>Friday the 13th</i> so I could control the property, and I could control the money, and I could go to New Line and try to make <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i>” (Bracke 218).<br />
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Cunningham established Crystal Lake Entertainment after securing the rights to the <i>Friday the 13th</i> franchise and made a deal with New Line Cinema to begin development on <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> in 1994. New Line would own the rights to a reported 17 commissioned screenplays by a dozen screenwriters at a cost exceeding six million dollars (Bracke 267). Though Cunningham calculated the iron was hot for the monster mash-up as New Line seemed disinterested in resurrecting the Nightmare series, development on <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> came screeching to a halt in 1994 when New Line announced that Wes Craven would return to helm a post-modern take on Freddy. Refusing to give up on the project, Cunningham conceded to put <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> on the backburner and resurrecting Jason for a concurrent renewal of interest with Freddy Krueger. Though it was never his intention to form Crystal Lake Entertainment or partner with New Line Cinema to make another <i>Friday the 13th</i> film, Cunningham co-produced 1993’s <i>Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday</i> with his true mission in mind. <br />
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The single most memorable and oft-discussed scene from an otherwise forgettable <i>Jason Goes to Hell</i> is its epilogue. After Jason has been defeated and the film’s protagonists walk off into the sunrise with their baby, a dog unearths Jason’s hockey mask and, in a <i>Carrie</i>-like moment, the film ends with Freddy Krueger’s claw reaching out of hell to grab it. Narratively anachronistic and apropos of nothing, the moment is a carefully conceived gag by producer Cunningham and director Adam Marcus that generated massive amounts of buzz amongst the fanbase.<br />
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Marcus recalls, “I called Mark Ordesky and Michael De Luca at New Line and asked, ‘Can we have the claw?’ And it was very funny ‘cause they were a bit covetous of it. They asked nervously, ‘What are you going to do with it? And why?’ But when we told them out idea, they flipped” (Bracke 268). At the first test screening, the “entire test audience got up on their feet and cheered,” and Cunningham finally sparked the interest at New Line he fought for (Bracke 269). Development began, and scripts started coming in by 1994, but with them, a new list of challenges. <br />
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<i>Freddy vs. Jason</i>’s journey from concept to screen was long and unconventional. As existing franchises, the high-concept to be sold to a ready-made market creates a unique set of challenges: fan expectations for both franchises must be considered, and the internal story-worlds must coalesce. A website built as a companion to <i>The Nightmare Series Encyclopedia</i> DVD has made available five of the seventeen screenplays licensed by New Line Cinema, each by different screenwriters or teams, including the final draft by Damian Shannon and Mark J. Swift which was chosen for <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i>.<br />
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Each version represents unique challenges faced by the screenwriters to bring these two characters into an acceptable world with a narrative fans would enjoy. Yet, despite drastic differences in story and tone, certain narrative elements—namely, the presence of a cult of “Fred Heads” trying to resurrect Freddy Krueger and the use of a sleep drug—find their way into many of these screenplays. The similarities suggest someone at New Line was very enthusiastic about—if not outright coaching—certain story ideas from early in the developmental stage. <br />
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One of the first commissioned scripts, Lewis Abernathy’s <i>Nightmare 13: Freddy Meets Jason</i>, makes an earnest attempt at merging the two universes. The central conflict revolves around a “Fred Head” cult attempting to resurrect Freddy and a group of teenagers needing to resurrect Jason to battle him. Some coincidences are a little too convenient—Elm Street and Camp Crystal Lake are within driving distance, and any old teenager can easily bring the fiends back from the dead—but the ideas gained momentum. Of the several incarnations that followed, the basic premise from Abernathy’s original script is the closest of the runners-up to the final product.<br />
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Its problems, those New Line likely had irreconcilable issues with, are in tone and character. The screenplay’s third act resembles a later <i>Nightmare on Elm Street</i> picture in that its horror is traded for cartoonish humor. Future screenwriters like Peter Briggs were afraid to approach the material because its premise sounded like a WWE fight, and Abernathy’s version fuels this fear. Freddy and Jason have a physical boxing match in hell, officiated by Ted Bundy and attended by Lee Harvey Oswald, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Popeye. Another character battles a giant booger named “Boogerman” in “Freddy’s nostril cavern”: a far cry from the dark tone in the first act in which a mentally handicapped thirteen-year old girl is kidnapped with the intention of being raped (Abernathy 84).<br />
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Furthermore, his Jason Voorhees is not the Jason fans love. He becomes a pawn for the teenagers to defeat Freddy and is sympathetic toward their cause. He interacts with people and, though he doesn’t speak, drives an ambulance at one point and is much more approachable than his historical representation. Twisted humor is an important element to both franchises, but New Line wisely decided to move in a direction more snarky than slapstick. <br />
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One of the stranger early screenplays was conceived by Peter Briggs. Briggs gained notoriety after selling his adaptation of Dark Horse Comics’ <i>Alien vs. Predator</i> to Twentieth Century Fox (another multi-franchise “versus” concept which spent years in production hell) and was hunted down by New Line producer Michael De Luca in early 1995 to take a stab at the material. Though reluctant, Briggs accepted the proposal and wrote a treatment and eventually a screenplay not much interested in the existing <i>Nightmare</i> or <i>Friday</i> universes.<br />
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Briggs’s version of the story is that development worker at New Line, Wyck Godfrey told him “’what we want to do is something that is kind of like <i>The Omen</i> in tone, we want it to be dark and heavy’” (Diggle). And dark it is, if convoluted. His version of <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> is something of a sequel to <i>Jason Goes To Hell </i>in that its protagonists defeated Jason ten years earlier. The tone juxtaposes millennial tension with fantasy horror elements as a centuries-old cult uses prophecies to resurrect Freddy and Jason who are now ancient evils. The screenplay is rife with hell imagery (one slug line reads “EXT. “PLAIN OF BONES” – HELL – ZERO HOUR”) and its stakes bring about the end of the universe (Briggs 12). When De Luca passed the screenplay up to Co-chairman Robert Shaye, Briggs was met with silence and was eventually told, “’it’ll cost twice as much as we’re prepared to spend,’” but one questions if a combination of Briggs’ tone and lack of interest in the franchise hurt his chances (Diggle).<br />
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New Line was closer to the formula they were looking for by 1998, as thematic devices and narrative events in Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger’s third draft of <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> coincide with those in the final product. Unlike the attempts by Abernathy and Briggs, the Aibel/Berger screenplay doesn’t spend much of its narrative focus on outside characters (the “Fred Heads” of the former) or creating its own mythology (Freddy and Jason as puppets being controlled by an ancient underworld demon of the latter). The Freddy cult is still prevalent (just as it is in the Damian Shannon and Mark J. Swift version which was eventually adapted), but it is a catalyst rather than the antagonist of central action.<br />
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Tonally, too, this version of the screenplay respects its fans and brandishes a similar humorous voice to the one the film eventually took on. Though the Aibel/Berger screenplay is also wise to respect franchise history without being a direct narrative sequel, what may have hurt its chances was that it is a little too post-modern in tone. Owing something to the meta tendencies of <i>Wes Craven’s New Nightmare</i> (1994) and the self-referential treatment of <i>Scream</i> (1996), what is unique about Freddy and Jason in the Aibel/Berger screenplay is that they are understood as movie characters.<br />
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One character tells us in obvious dialogue, “Jason Voorhees is just a movie character. He isn’t real.” (Aibel 58) while another tells us, “I wouldn’t worry about Mr. Frederic J. Krueger. I’ve seen all the movies” (Aibel 19). It’s all a little too tongue-in-cheek, and presents logical anachronisms when they turn out to be real life characters with no explanation (David Goyer and James D. Robinson would run into similar problems with their version,<i> A Nightmare on the 13th</i>, in which Jason and Freddy are villains with established motives, but exist only in the protagonist’s head, later materializing).<br />
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Another faux pas that would surely have been worked out in a rewrite, but couldn’t have boded well with New Line development, is that this screenplay has Jason speak: a severe misunderstanding of the character. Nevertheless, the screenplay presents us with many elements in such a successful fashion that they would serve as an outline for the Shannon/Swift version: Freddy is trying to reenter the modern world by public consciousness, pharmaceuticals are developed for dream sharing, and the showdown eventually takes place at Camp Crystal Lake so that Jason can “pull” Freddy into the real world. Shannon and Swift would run with these elements, but construct them around a convincing universe rife with consistency of story logic. Perhaps too much story logic. <br />
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The first draft of Damian Shannon and Mark J. Swift’s <i>Freddy vs. Jason </i>clocked at 148 minutes and is careful to establish a credible universe heavy on expositional back story. “It was overly long and overly complicated and very, very dense,” says senior V.P. of Production at New Line, Stokely Chaffin. “This may be the <i>American Beauty</i> of horror films, but it’s not <i>American Beauty</i> and it probably shouldn’t be two-and-a-half hours long” (“Genesis”). New Line brought in David Goyer (who was already paid for a draft of his own vision of <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i>) to write an uncredited revision of the Shannon & Swift screenplay. <br />
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Goyer was able to collapse scenes and characters which subsequently escalated the drama and intensity. Goyer’s consolidation brings the runtime down to 97 minutes without sacrificing Shannon and Swift’s vision. One of the expositional cuts, however, eliminated the much-explored “Fred Head” cult so popular in the project’s developmental stages. The backstory is established in a couple minutes of Freddy Krueger voiceover which establishes the premise that Freddy has been publically forgotten and can’t rise to power without people being scared of him. In Goyer’s rewrite it is Freddy himself who scours the depths of hell to find Jason to instill fear back into Elm Street’s populace. Unlike Shannon and Swift’s screenplay, Goyer’s rewritten prologue establishes this by minute three. Goyer’s revision of the Shannon/Swift screenplay was something that both New Line’s developmental team liked in terms of story, and Cunningham’s camp at Crystal Lake Entertainment found acceptable in terms of universe consistency, but the script wouldn’t be the only obstacle between concept and screen. <br />
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In 2000, New Line Cinema would undergo a shake-up in the upper ranks of executive production. Michael De Luca, longtime proponent of the project and friend of Sean Cunningham stepped down as President of Production at New Line, and it fell onto Co-chairman Robert Shaye to find a new production executive to tackle the project with enthusiasm. Shaye explains, “when we changed our head of production, we renewed this imperative to [new President of Production] Toby Emmerich that we had to find someone who is going to get behind this” (Bracke 271-2). The project fell to new hire Stokely Chaffin who nurtured the promise De Luca saw in Shannon and Swift’s treatment, and would be the keystone in connecting with David Goyer to polish the project. Chaffin also interviewed dozens of directors before finding the perfect match of enthusiasm and experience in Ronny Yu. <br />
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Principal photography began in September 2002, and the film was released in August 2003. The production budget of $32 million was restrictive, though helped by much of the film being shot in Vancouver, Canada. Highly unusual and the source of much of the production hell <i>Freddy vs. Jason </i>experienced is the fact that nearly $7 million—over twenty percent—of its $32m budget was spent on ten years of script development. <br />
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The investment would pay off for New Line, as the film’s nearly $115 million worldwide box-office pull outperformed every film from either franchise by leaps and bounds. <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> is a unique Hollywood success story which spent years in development hell despite an early green-lit concept, iconic characters and a built-in audience. Ultimately it is the push and pull between Sean Cunningham’s rulebook of unbreakable universe rules and New Line’s commitment to story which met the expectations of fans from both franchises. The iconic pop culture status of Freddy and Jason exponentially compound the built-in audience of the typical slasher film and, though the road to bringing the two together was far from smooth, the box-office receipts prove the developmental investment was worthwhile. <br />
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<u>Works Cited </u><br />
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Abernathy, Lewis. <i>Nightmare 13: Freddy Meets Jason</i>. Film script. NightmareOnElmStreetFilms.com. 12 Feb. 2014. <br />
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Aibel, Jonathan and Glenn Berger. <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i> (third draft). Film script. 1998. NightmareOnElmStreetFilms.com. 30 Jan. 2014. <br />
<br />
Bracke, Peter M. <i>Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th</i>. London: Titan Books, 2005. <br />
<br />
Briggs, Peter. <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i>. Film script. NightmareOnElmStreetFilms.com. 15 Feb. 2014. <br />
<br />
Diggle, Andy. Peter Briggs Interview. AliensCollection.com, 1996. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. <http://www.alienscollection.com/andydiggle.html> <br />
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“Genesis: Development Hell” (supplementary material on DVD release of <i>Freddy vs. Jason</i>). 2003. DVD. New Line Home Video, 2004. <br />
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“Horror Pics a Crowded Path to Boxoffice, But Lucrative.” <i>Variety</i> March 3, 1982: p. 20. <br />
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<i>The House that Freddy Built</i>. Dir. Jeffrey Schwarz. New Line Home Video, 2006. DVD. <br />
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Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6518011537005181616.post-78398543902336646292014-07-02T16:24:00.000-07:002014-07-02T16:27:20.722-07:00The Gender War in the Comedies of Preston SturgesTo confine the classic era of screwball comedy between the years 1934 and 1942 as many scholars do (Duane Byrge in <i>The Screwball Comedy Films</i>, Wes D. Gehring in <i>Screwball Comedy: Defining a Genre</i>) not only canonizes Howard Hawks as the genre’s innovator, but leaves the best films of Preston Sturges in a chronological purgatory. True, during the Second World War some of the genre’s key tropes began to change out of historic necessity. The wearing-on of the Great Depression made it difficult for audiences to continue to identify with aristocratic, leisurely madcap couples without a certain resentment, and the realities of war’s effects on the American psyche made it increasingly difficult for audiences to accept the small-town, political-minded crackerbarrel hero’s naiveté. Further, newfound independent desires of women born out of their unprecedented shift to the workplace were followed by their counterparts on screen. Gender roles perpetuated by Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey and Frank Capra with the onset of the screwball comedy (itself “supplant[ing] the cracker-barrel figure in American humor”) began to equate the comedic male with the anti-hero (Gehring 6). But despite the moral difference between these two types of comedic male, in terms of gender studies the point is moot: hero or anti-hero, the male is still the central figure.<br />
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Women have an increased agency in these screwball comedies, but it is doled out with a condescending share of skewed worldview, illogical at best, hysterical at worst. Unlike the comedies of Capra and Hawks, the films of Preston Sturges (late to the screwball party, but innovator of a his own brand of anarchy during the war years) are not only unafraid to knock masculinity down a peg but offer their female characters an agency rivaled only in that <i>other</i> female-oriented genre, melodrama. Where traditional romantic comedies and melodrama both tend toward reestablishment of patriarchal ideologies in their resolutions, Sturges’s films appear uninterested in the status quo. Though owing to the screwball tradition, the comedies he wrote, directed and in many cases produced once the American war effort was in full swing subvert traditional gender roles even within the genre. His screwball comedies before America entered the war, <i>The Lady Eve</i> and <i>The Palm Beach Story</i> subvert patriarchy though frustration of their male characters and an application of the female gaze. His wartime films, <i>The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek</i> and <i>Hail the Conquering Hero</i> express female independence by mimicking the societal prominence of women and subjecting masculinity to roles conventionally delegated to women: domesticity and mother worship. His postwar comedy, <i>Unfaithfully Yours</i> suggests war has changed gender roles and patriarchal reestablishment (as represented by the male gaze) is no longer possible in his newfound jolted world. Through both characterization and formal technique, the romantic comedies of Preston Sturges present an increased agency for its female characters who author their destinies while holding influence over their male counterparts.<br />
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There is a certain liberation in the comedic genres for both genders. Male representation historically holds a monopoly on the tragic hero as patriarchal ideologies allow only men to write their own destinies and take on efficacious adventure. Women, according to the patriarchal view, are placed in domestic settings; heterosexual love their only adventure. Women aren’t excluded from tragedy, only their agency within it is. Therefore, the feminized version of tragedy—the melodrama—still lacks potency of cause-effect individualism. Female “weepies” are exercises in victimization, positioning “the spectator as powerless to avert the catastrophes they enact, and in fact produce those tears out of that powerlessness” (Rowe 41). If George Cukor’s <i>The Women</i> and John Stahl’s<i> Imitation of Life</i> suggest female agency through female-centered narratives and sheer screen time, the women’s power is undermined by domestic ideologies. These women still define themselves by their relation to men.<br />
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The narrative comedy, conversely, often subverts gender conventions. Comedy’s anarchy disrupts authoritarian hierarchy. What it reestablishes (though often still patriarchal, as the films nearly always end in romantic marriage, established sexual roles, female domesticity and male dominance) is the “Oedipal story, or the formation of the couple”: a victory for the male character (Rowe 44). Leo McCarey’s <i>The Awful Truth</i> seems similar in thematic structure to Sturges’s <i>The Palm Beach Story</i>, only McCarey’s take resolves with the male lead embracing his ex-wife after admitting the error of his ways. The trajectory is solely male as the wife desires nothing but reconciliation by the beginning of act two. Similarly, Howard Hawks’s <i>My Girl Friday</i> gives narrative agency to its male lead who rescues his ex-wife from marrying his rival, only to remarry him. Domestication is the lone result even for a successful businesswoman, and the film’s very title views the woman as possession. The men of screwball comedy achieve autonomy over their father and, though often made a fool of along the way, find their own success and identity in family. This doesn’t offer women the same autonomy—their role is well-established as domestic. Traditional screwball comedy of the prewar era placates the appearance of female independence that arose out of the 1920s. These women are granted limited agency and romantic adventure, but the films reinstate a patriarchal ideology which ends in female domestication. Screwball comedy plays with gender in a way which raises question as to who wears the pants in the relationship (literally, as Katharine Hepburn’s character would attest in <i>Bringing Up Baby</i>). Only in Preston Sturges’s prewar screwball comedies, female agency doesn’t end with marriage.<br />
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Even by the strictest definition, Sturges’s two films immediately preceding American intervention in the war, <i>The Lady Eve</i> and <i>The Palm Beach Story</i>, certainly quality as screwball. They are both domestic narratives structured around leisure and wealth which present their male leads (Henry Fonda’s Charles and Joel McCrea’s Tom, respectively) with a great deal of gender- and social-frustration. Capitalism has done right by the men in these films. The new love interest of Claudette Colbert’s Gerry in <i>The Palm Beach Story</i>, Mr. Hackensacker comes from a family of big oil (or “The Erl King” as his private yacht reads). In fact, she has only found her way to divorce through the handsome cash gift from a rich, leisurely and nearly-deaf Wienie King. Gerry’s husband, Tom seems to be the only male finding difficulty in his finances and this is the sole problem with his marriage. However, this “problem” is narratively structured in Sturges’s screenplay in an unrealistic fashion through screwball tropes. Tom’s financial problems aren’t a result of working-class drudgery; instead, Tom takes on a leisurely occupation of “inventor”, trying to sell his conceptualized suspended airport rather than working his fingers to the bone. The film presents very real domestic problems of finance, but paints Tom as a screwball character whose life is defined by leisure and whose profession is not recognized as serious employment. Gerry subverts patriarchal ideology as the males’ only power is in wealth. Hers lies elsewhere. Male gaze is thwarted as Claudette Colbert is often covered in a long overcoat or oversized men’s pajamas. At one point, as Hackensacker is lavishing gifts upon Gerry, Colbert is wearing a long skirt, long-sleeved blouse, white gloves and a wrap hat which covers her neck. Hackensacker unironically asks, “aren’t the sleeves a little short?” as if to suggest the power of female allure rests somewhere beyond nudity.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Aren't the sleeves a little short?"</td></tr>
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When a man appears to leer at Gerry from a train bunk, she subverts this look by stepping on his face for a boost into the upper bunk. It’s a none-too-subtle symbol employed by Sturges which suggests perhaps power is not held in the male gaze, but he is captive to it. The slapstick of the scene mocks patriarchal values, just as when Tom falls down the stairs and embarrassingly has his pants (a symbol of manhood) ripped off in the apartment hallway. The male, as symbol of patriarchy, is mocked while women refuse to be objectified.<br />
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This stifling of screwball comedy’s patriarchal values through frustration of the male lead is much the same for Charles in The Lady Eve. Charles is heir to an ale fortune which, though he has no interest in the venture, has provided a leisurely life as an ophiologist, exploring the Amazon for snakes on his father’s dime. Any conflict, including romance, seems mere triviality in Charles’s life as his identity is not defined by his employment. Hollywood’s traditional male-dominated heroic genres from adventure to detective/mystery and tragedy of historical epic have equated male autonomy with occupation. The wealth and leisure that comes along with the structure of screwball comedy often eliminates this professionalism. Genre roles are twisted and female agency is gained in part because of this disallowance of male identity through occupation. Yet, as Gehring argues, if the “goal of the genre [is] to bring the joy of childhood’s spontaneity to an adult [male] grown brittle,” the increased female agency owing to the genre’s male frustration is tempered by the common screwball representation of women as hysterical (Gehring 10).<br />
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The male learns that life in an irrational world must be conquered by a dose of craziness—a craziness the female must embody. So, in a case of two-steps forward, one-step back, the female in screwball comedy is an agent of her destiny and filmic action, but it comes with a condescension that, while technically a case of role-reversal, women acting in the position of men must also be illogical. In <i>Bringing Up Baby</i>, Cary Grant’s comic rigidity is contrasted by a real questioning of Katharine Hepburn’s sanity. Yet these roles are shifted in Sturges’s prewar screwballs. Gerry leaves Tom in the first act of <i>The Palm Beach Story</i>, leaving a note for him proclaiming it her only “logical” option, but it is the male characters who are the eccentrics: The Wienie King bankrolls strangers and Tom builds unfeasible airport models. There is strength in Sturges’s female leads and a notable buck to Hollywood’s trend: Claudette Colbert and Barbara Stanwyck not only play the characters that primarily pull the strings in their narratives, they also each receive top billing. The same cannot be said of the female leads in <i>Twentieth Century</i>, <i>It Happened One Night</i> or <i>His Girl Friday</i>.<br />
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In addition to Sturges subverting patriarchal ideologies through mocking masculinity, he employs thematic and formal tools that deny power to male gaze and suggest a female gaze in his prewar screwball comedies. This subversive take supplants assumed patriarchal power by making the female leads authors of their own destiny. Elizabeth Abele argues:<br />
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Though the narrative and the gaze in a screwball comedy may attempt to follow traditional male patterns, the screwball heroine continually subverts them. Though she presents herself as a prospective object of the male gaze, she rarely remains motionless or stops talking long enough to conform to the fully objectified position. (Abele)</blockquote>
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The women in Preston Sturges’s screwball comedies are keenly aware of the power of their sexuality so, while they acknowledge a gaze, they use it to their advantage. "I was broke, too when I was about your age, but I didn't have a figure like you've got,” the Wienie King tells Gerry in <i>The Palm Beach Story</i>. “I had to use my brains,” as if a financial success story carries with it a patriarchal bias as well as a testament to masculine logic. Only this logic is character specific; we don’t see these patriarchal ideologies play out in Sturges’s screwball or post-screwball narratives. True, his male characters are defined by modern, gender-specific frustrations, but the female characters are near-equals and never (thematically or formally) is their power merely sexual. It is usually the male characters’ narrow views within the narrative, not Sturges’s voice, which rings patriarchal and, in the end, untrue. The Wienie King is not the only character in <i>The Palm Beach Story</i> who must surrender to Gerry’s ascendancy: Tom is constrained by both his patriarchal views and his masculine lack. “$700 ...Just like that? ...Sex didn’t even enter into it?,” Tom asks, confounded by his wife’s capability and certain of her infidelity when Gerry is gifted a large sum of money. According to Tom’s ideology, sex is a woman’s only power, just as provision is only a man’s duty. His confusion and frustration are drawn out of a recognition that his wife (having remained faithful) was able to accomplish what he could not, and when his business dealings finally do reap their reward, it is again due to Gerry’s manipulation.<br />
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Gerry was always the driving agent from the beginning of their marriage (in a pre-credit montage, we see that Gerry has bound her twin sister in order to trick Tom into taking her hand at the alter), and the two renew their vows at the end of the film only after Gerry is able to take credit for every one of Tom’s supposed achievements. Furthermore, Gerry’s success is not one built on Tom’s patriarchal values of honesty and hard-work, but conniving deceit and recognition of gender and youth as a tool. Antiestablishment, indeed. And while Gerry spends the entire picture concocting what appears to be a life of domesticity, the film makes very clear that Gerry has no desire to be a housewife. She can’t cook or sew, and has little inclination to care to do so. The domestication of women, a conventional assumption within patriarchal ideology, is inverted in the world of Preston Sturges. Though women may desire marriage—by social pressure or other—the domestication that occurs in Sturges’s comedies results in the metaphoric castration of husbands.<br />
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Just as Sturges avoids patriarchal screwball tendencies which “celebrated the sanctity of marriage, class distinction and the domination of women by men” through his narrative themes, his work seems tuned into progressive female representation—and female spectatorship—as his formal work is often neutral in terms of gaze (Sklar 188). The camera work Sturges chooses to employ is highly economical, a slave to the screenplay, and spends no time lingering on its females condescendingly or lasciviously. Male characters are certainly drawn to the sexual mystique of their female counterparts, but it is often represented by the female’s power over him. In <i>The Lady Eve</i>, we get a rare point-of-view shot from Henry Fonda’s Charles. Jean has already asserted her power, telling him “you’ll have to kneel down,” so Charles looks up, a slave to the one his desires, and the shot is distorted to symbolize Charles being drunk on perfume (her allure). Sturges’s most explicit example of literal female gaze comes in <i>The Lady Eve</i>. As women vie for Charles’s attention, Jean pulls out a pocket mirror and watches his every move.<br />
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We see the action through her mirror—a pictorial representation of the female gaze—and Jean narrates over her voyeuristic display. This agency is a rare example that flies in the face of Kaplan’s theory when she argues, “men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession which is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannon act upon it” (Kaplan 31). Quite the contrary, Jean’s voyeurism and narration assert her power over Charles who becomes an objectified pawn in her control. Jean’s power is even omniscient as her narration dictates how Charles will act: “Look at the girl over to his left. Look over to your left, bookworm, there’s a girl pining for you. A little further, just a little further, there.” In a film which already undermines patriarchal ideologies, Jean’s female gaze through Sturges’s formal technique present us with a female who is in control of her actions and desires as well as the actions of others. It is not simply a case of a woman stepping into the role of men in which women are still objectified; Charles becomes the objectified and Jean’s desires, whether romantic or financial, are met solely through the power of her own action.<br />
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When men aren’t being bested by their female counterparts, Sturges’s own symbolism and wordplay suggest implicitly what the Production Code wouldn’t allow explicitly. Sturges’s suggestiveness is usually in the same vein of his mockery of masculinity: despite the charade of patriarchal order, women hold the power in domestic relationships. Kay Young argues screwball comedies are unique in that women are given agency in active roles without playing “masculine” leads. A symbolic castration is present in these strong female roles as “the American man of screwball comedy retains his sexual organ but comes perhaps to wonder just what to do with it” (Young 196). This is very much the case of Charles in <i>The Lady Eve</i> who is content staying in his cabin with his pet snake locked up. The Wienie King in <i>The Palm Beach Story</i> is seemingly rendered impotent by age, yet made his fortune in the sausage business. Masculinity is neutered as Sturges refuses his male leads to define themselves by profession, renders chivalry archaic (Hackensacker of <i>The Palm Beach Story</i> laments, “Chivalry is not only dead, it’s decomposed!”) and symbolically removes their libido. If prewar screwball comedies sought to reinstate patriarchal ideologies to keep women in a domesticated role, Sturges refuses them by offering his female characters increased agency while decreasing male power. As the role of women would become more socially visible with the onset of the American war effort, Sturges’s female characters, too, would grow more independent.<br />
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The American workforce took a hit as men went off to war, and the number of working women increased from 12 million before the war, to 18 million by 1944 (Campbell 100). These women attained a disposable income (with little product during the war time on which to spend it) and an independence from domesticity they hadn’t seen before. Film attendance, now more female than ever, “continued to grow and be strong throughout this era. Between 1942 and 1945, Americans spent 23% of their total recreational dollar on films (compared to 2% today)” (Pautz 71-72). These working-class women could identify with the strong, independent characters they saw on screen. While the female leads in many screwball comedies were wealthy heiresses, how much more could these women identify with a Gerry Jeffers or Trudy Kockenocker? These young working women were “suddenly transported into a realm of excitement, prominence and wealth ... the women in the movies had the same objective as the middle- and working-class female inhabitants of Muncie, Indiana” (Lent 331).<br />
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The questions of female agency and the domestication of men become more clearly defined as Sturges’s work progresses out of the screwball genre. Unlike conventional screwball comedy which at least tempers demasculinization with beautiful men (Cary Grant may have been forced into a woman’s robe in <i>Bringing Up Baby</i>, but he was still Cary Grant), the increased power of women in Sturges’s films is coupled by emasculated male leads represented by milquetoast, comedic anti-hero Eddie Bracken. Bracken became the perfect face for Sturges’s American masculinity during World War II. The humor in his nebbish portrayals subverts traditional patriarchy while a now more-female audience is empowered through masculine mockery. Cary Grant he is not.<br />
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As World War II works its way into American consciousness, Sturges intrinsically links military service with masculinity. Eddie Bracken’s Norval Jones and Woodrow Truesmith, too, recognize the patriarchal importance of civic duty, but both characters are denied the opportunity to become a patriot on the battlefield: Norval a 4-F rejectee breaks out in “bumps” as a nervous wreck; Woodrow has been discharged due to chronic hay fever. It is no coincidence that each of these Bracken characters is denied the possibility of war hero due to trivialities. The conditions themselves become laughable, much to their characters’ chagrin for, much like everything else in the Sturges universe, the incidentals of fate hold authority over either patriarchal intentions or feminine subversion. Perhaps coincidence is the great equalizer. This doesn’t prevent the women from trying, however for, like Jean in <i>The Lady Eve</i>, teenaged Trudy and Emmy in <i>The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek</i> continually get the best of their father, Constable Edmund Kockenlocker who is a symbol of both patriarchy and justice in the town. Trudy’s night out is full of the excitement and decadence Lent spoke of in discussing the desires of the newly independent female working-class (all in the name of patriotism, mind you), but the consequence of pregnancy after a night of dancing, drunkenness, revelry, and a sham marriage is very real and calls for a new kind of hero: a demasculinized Norval, the virgin father of six who devotes his life to a woman named “Kockenlocker.”<br />
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Like Hackensacker in <i>The Palm Beach Story</i>, Norval is a sucker for the feminine mystique. And, like Gerry, Trudy isn’t hesitant to lord this power over her admirer, as unpolished as he might be. Again, marriage is desired by the female lead but again she rejects conventional domesticity. Norval admits to taking home economics classes throughout his high school career just to be near Trudy, and it becomes evident that Norval is the more successful homemaker. Trudy becomes the agent of Norval’s misadventures which include taking on a false identity, jailed on (and guilty of) several criminal charges, homelessness and hiding on the lam, all of which leading up to (and somehow narratively compatible to) marrying into the position of presumed father of Trudy’s sextuplets. Norval has greatness “thrust upon” him, and doesn’t have time to be a reluctant hero. He becomes the public scapegoat who must inversely take on the shame Trudy would were her indiscretion revealed. It’s a sophisticated gender role reversal which doesn’t seek to moralize in regards to drunken fornication, but toward the hypocrisy of small-town haughtiness. The film certainly isn’t patriarchal, but is a farce on the feminine desires of the melodrama as well. Norval gets marriage without a domesticated wife and kids without consummation. Trudy gets protection, but not romantic love. The genre rift goes both ways as the film “makes clear that Trudy would never have married Norval but for her pregnancy. She doesn’t give this ungainly clunk the time of day when her mind’s on romance” (Jacobs 298). So unconventional family rules the day when marriage is a consolation anything but romantic or patriarchal.<br />
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If male frustration is ignited in screwball comedy by coupling the modernity of urban landscape with female agency, Sturges shifts the setting to small-town America—conservative values in tow—for his two greatest examples of patriarchal obstruction. <i>The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek</i> risked chiding the war effort, for it is the anonymous soldier who impregnates Trudy. And just as Norval goes through a gender role reversal, playing societal scapegoat for the castigation a female would likely receive, he also goes through a masculine role reversal, becoming town hero though denied the possibility of military hero or sexual potency. Bracken’s Woodrow in <i>Hail the Conquering Hero</i> is, too, heroized despite deceit, caricature, and military impotence during a time when war made the man. Only rather than rebelling against the father, it is the other half of the Oedipal complex that defines Woodrow: mother worship.E. Ann Kaplan argues, “the domination of women by the male gaze is part of patriarchal strategy to contain the threat that the mother embodies and to control the positive and negative impulses that memory traces of being mothered have left in the male unconscious” (Kaplan 205). If Sturges’s strong female characters don’t already eschew domination by the male gaze, <i>Hail the Conquering Hero</i> must be considered an anti-patriarchal text as its hero, Woodrow embraces mother worship—a philosophy endorsed by both servicemen and the community.<br />
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We are told Libby is Woodrow’s life-long love, only he shows little interest throughout the narrative. He appears genuinely relieved when Libby admits to have taken a fiancé in Woodrow’s absence. “That’s marvelous,” Woodrow tells her, calm for an instant. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. At least I don’t need to worry about you.” It isn’t the only instance where Woodrow’s machismo is challenged. When he explains his dilemma to the Marines on his train ride home, he tells them of Libby (though concerns of her are always secondary to those or his mother) saying, “it’s not only my mother, I’ve got a girl. I mean, I did have.” “What did you tell her?” asks Sgt. Heppelfinger, “You was going in the navy?” This jab at Woodrow’s effeminate stature and nebbish behavior insinuates the possibility of homosexuality: a challenge to the patriarchal masculinity Kaplan argues the male gaze tries to prevent. Yet when the truth of Woodrow’s charade comes out, the most trustworthy man in town, mayoral candidate Doc Bissell comes to his defense saying, “if tenderness toward and consideration of one’s mother was a fault, it was a fault any man might be proud of.”<br />
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That the film’s resolution reunites Woodrow and Libby is secondary to the fact that he has made his mother proud and gets to return home to her on an assumed permanent basis. Though the agency of the film certainly rests with its male characters, the feminine influence over their agency challenges Kaplan’s patriarchal strategy. As women held down the home front, they metaphorically shed their domestication. Bracken’s Norval and Woodrow represent the jolted male who returns from war to find his gender roles reversed. Traditional concepts of masculinity are tempered by the agency of girlfriends and mothers and Norval becomes the perfect husband because “he can do all the housework.” These films suggest the shared (if not displaced) domesticity and leveling of gendered power is a good for women.<br />
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But power, in the Sturges universe, had shifted with the war. The traditional screwball comedies which urged reestablishment of patriarchal ideologies was never embraced by Sturges. In both theme and form, Sturges acknowledges the desire of the male gaze, but refuses it any leverage. From a Lacanian pretext, one would expect a film like <i>Unfaithfully Yours</i> to be rife with male gaze as much of the narrative takes place in a man’s head. After coming to suspect his young, attractive wife may have committed adultery, virtuoso symphony conductor Sir Alfred De Carter (Rex Harrison) spends the entire second act of the film imagining three different ways to confront his wife, Daphne with his newly discovered knowledge of infidelity: an elaborate murder of his wife and framing of supposed co-conspirator Tony, a melodramatic martyrdom in which Alfred nobly pays Daphne $100,000 to leave, and a duel in which Alfred demand the three play a game of Russian roulette until satisfaction is achieved.<br />
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Yet this postwar comedy presents us with Sturges’s most frazzled male lead: this third scenario played out in Alfred’s head ends quickly, as Alfred shoots himself in the temple. Formally, these daydreams play out like three different patriarchal genres: horror, melodrama and chivalric romance. Yet Alfred is not only the gazing voyeur but omniscient author of these scenarios. Never one for superfluous camera work, Sturges employs a rare technique emphasizing point of view. As we enter each reverie, the camera long zooms all the way into Alfred’s pupil. In these three daydreams, Alfred holds sole agency and takes on the patriarchal role ascribed to the male lead in each parodied genre, but such masculine grandeur is thwarted when Alfred must carry out his plan in the real world. Alfred’s apartment is turned into shambles through slapstick before all three of his plans fail him in the face of his wife.<br />
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A careful combination of Linda Darnell’s sophisticated performance as Daphne and Sturges’s screenplay and form suggests a female gaze trumping Alfred’s agency. Darnell subtly works minor variations into the different portrayals of Daphne which Alfred fails to recognize. In the scenes that take place in Alfred’s head, Daphne “says only the lines that he imagines she would say; and she responds exactly the way his mind thinks she would respond. Of course, she came out as still as a dummy, because she was allowed to say only what was in his mind” (Pirolini 141). Alfred is another of Sturges’s highly patriarchal characters whose hubris fails to recognize his wife’s true agency. Daphne is no “dummy,” she plays into Alfred’s patriarchal ego with a sublime touch absent in Alfred’s imaginings of her.<br />
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At the film’s resolution, Daphne tells Alfred, “I know what it’s like to be a great man, that is I don’t really but having so many responsibilities... so much tenseness... watching out for and protecting so many people.” These words, though bearing no truthful testament to anything we’ve seen of Alfred’s character, illicit his response which informs us of Daphne’s intentions. After the reconciliation, Alfred desires to again lavish his wife with riches, asking “will you put on your lowest cut, most vulgarly ostentatious dress with the largest and vulgarest jewels that you possess?” Alfred speaks to Daphne as if she was his possession, but Daphne’s sly manipulation of her husband shows the audience who is in control. Even when Alfred’s phallic imagery gets upgraded from small conductor’s wand to pistol, he renders himself useless in his own mind by losing at Russian roulette. Like the man who has returned home from war to find his patriarchal power impotent in a changed world, any fulfillment of male gaze is granted through the grace of the woman who perceives her own power. Sturges’s male leads grow from patriarchally frustrated in the prewar years to emasculated and destitute at war’s end.<br />
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As screwball comedies shifted during the war years and male leads became more anti-heroic, the comedies of Preston Sturges stepped away from traditional patriarchal ideologies that so many screwball comedies sought to reestablish. Female characters not only find increased agency at a time which paralleled female independence in the United States, Sturges couples this female power with formal techniques which suggest a female gaze. For Sturges, masculinity is never associated with capability, and even in his comedies which feature male leads, they fall victim to the feminine power of Oedipal binds. Sturges’s comedies offer subversive gender representation which question patriarchal ideologies. Though his films often end in (actual or presumed) matrimony, the gender roles Sturges employ far from purport domestic stereotype. Sturges’s female characters are never fixed stereotypes. While it would be a stretch to call his films feminist, the combination of female agency and male emasculation defy patriarchal categorization. Marriage is a given—for the best in the societal view of Sturges’s world—but the seemingly patriarchal trappings don’t reestablish the male as the sole proprietor of authority. Women author their own destinies in Preston Sturges’s romantic comedies and men are bound to their agency.<br />
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<u>Works Cited</u><br />
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Campbell, D'Ann. <i>Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era</i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.<br />
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Gehring, Wes D. <i>Screwball Comedy: Defining a Film Genre</i>. Muncie: Ball State University Press. 1983.<br />
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Gamman, Lorraine. “Watching the Detectives: The Enigma of the Female Gaze.” <i>The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture</i>. Ed. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment. Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1989. 8-26.<br />
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Jacobs, Diane. <i>Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges</i>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.<br />
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Kaplan, E. Ann. <i>Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera</i>. New York: Methuen, 1983.<br />
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Lent, Tina Olsin. “Romantic Love and Friendship: The Redefinition of Gender Relations in Screwball Comedy.” <i>Classical Hollywood Comedy</i>. Ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins. New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 315-331.<br />
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Pautz, Michelle. “The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance: 1930-2000.” <i>Issues in Political Economy</i>, Vol. 11 (2002): 70-87. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.<br />
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Pirolini, Alessandro. <i>The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study</i>. Jefferson: McFarland &<br />
Company Inc., 2010.<br />
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Rowe, Kathleen. “Comedy, Melodrama and Gender: Theorizing the Genres of Laughter”. <i>Classical Hollywood Comedy</i>. Ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins. New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 39-59.<br />
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Sklar, Robert. <i>Movie-Made America</i>. New York: Random House, 1994. 175-194.<br />
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Young, Kay. <i>Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy</i>. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2001.Tony Pellumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08616721324512846171noreply@blogger.com0