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skimpole

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Posts posted by skimpole

  1. Since you mentioned it, I looked up the nominees. Here are my choices for Best Actress Oscar, 1960s:

     

    1960: Deborah Kerr, The Sundowners

    1961: Sophia Loren, Two Women (She did win).

    1962: All the ladies were great and equally deserving (Bancroft, Davis, Hepburn, Page, Remick).

    1963: Leslie Caron, The L-Shaped Room

    1964: Kim Stanley, Seance on a Wet Afternoon

    1965: Simone Signoret, Ship of Fools or Elizabeth Hartman, A Patch of Blue

    1966: Ida Kaminska, The Shop on Main Street

    1967: Edith Evans, The Whisperers

    1968: Patricia Neal, The Subject Was Roses

    1969: Maggie Smith: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (She did win).

     

    I would consider roles that weren't actually nominated.

  2. Darling, as I've mentioned before, strikes me as a very unimpressive movie.  Of the best actress winners of the sixties, Smith is the only one I'd give the oscar to.  Streisand comes close, and I'd nominate Taylor in Who's Afraid of Viriginia Woolf, but she wouldn't have a prayer against Persona.  Even among the nominees for 1965, I'd prefer Julie Andrews.

  3. James Mason in North by Northwest.  And does anyone really dislike Claude Rains in The Adventures of Robin Hood?

     

    Also I keep forgetting what the motive of the murderer in Evil Under the Sun is, the perfect example of the solution being more interesting than the crime.  So I'm not that upset with the murderer's actions.  To say more would give away too much.  Also Ray Bolger is clearly the most interesting character in Babes in Toyland, but that's incompetence on the part of the filmmakers.  In versions of Ten Little Indians, I'm most sympathetic to the Blore character.

     

    Nor do I think are we supposed to dislike Norma Desmond.  She's still a fine actress, while William Holden's character is a parasite who can't write a decent screenplay.  Likewise, we're not supposed to share the protagonist's view of the "villain" in The Searchers, and we should be increasingly skeptical of the Corleone's view of its enemies in the first two Godfather movies.

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  4. Clearly it was better for me to give than to receive.  I got my nephew DVDs of The Day of the Jackal and All the President's Men.  I got my niece a DVD of Invitation to the Dance, and my brother a DVD of Atlantic City, while I gave my sister a DVD of Two Days, One Night while both she and her husband got a copy of To The Wonder.  Whether they will actually watch these DVDs is an open question.  I actually asked for a copy of The Confession for Christmas, but clearly it was too awkward for them to get.  So I got a lot of very generous gift certificates, which I used to get books.

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  5. I saw five movies this week.  Peter the Great, Part One, is a 1937 Soviet film about the Russian monarch.  It's actually based on a novel of his life by Alexei Tolstoy, a distant cousin of the more famous Leo, which happened to be according to some reports Stalin's favorite novel.  Apparently the novel is slightly better than that, and so is the movie.  The version I saw was based on an awful print, and it starts out poorly.  And one can see the Stalinist elements when Peter bullies his nobles into following Western ways.  It's certainly not formally or intellectually on the same level as Ivan the Terrible.  But the lead performance is interesting, and there are some interesting battle scenes half way through the movie.  Swing Shift starts off with Goldie Hawn being unrecognizable, then with the movie becoming more likeable as Hawn gets a war job and becoming her usual self.  Her romance with Kurt Russell develops, but then Ed Harris returns and the movie loses what focus it has.  The Forbidden Room is certainly the most interesting movie I saw this week.  For once I appreciated Maddin's faux silent movie aesthetic, told in a series of interlocking weird stories that vaguely resemble A Manuscript Found in Saragossa.  I saw part of Babes in Toyland when I was eight.  Seeing the entire movie the problems with it become more apparent.  While very colorful, and the battle of toys at the end does have seem genuine charm, there is a complete absence of genius.  One problem is that Ray Bolger and Ed Wynn are patently more interesting than the leads, who are quite dull.  Finally, there is A Walk among the Tombstones.  I haven't actually seen Liam Neeson's vigilante movies before this, and I suspect that is a comparatively sober and competent example of it.  The slightly unreal sadism of the villains becomes a problem the more one thinks about it, and there's a clumsiness with the added-on climax, supposedly much less depressing than the one in the original novel.

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  6. Some presidents have appeared in movies:  Sunrise at Campobello, Wilson, Lincoln, Thirteen Days, Nixon are the ones that immediately come to mind.  I know there's been a movie where Andrew Johnson is the hero.  And John Quincey Adams appears in Amistad after his presidency had ended.  But what about the less obvious examples.  What about Madison, Monroe, both Harrisons, Tyler, Polk, the four pre-Civil war presidents, as well as Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, McKinley, Taft, Harding and Coolidge?

  7. I lived in a rather small town, and until I was 18, there were only two TV channels I could watch.  This limited the kind of movies I could see on television.  I remember staying up late on either New Years Day 1982 or the day before to rewatch Murder on the Orient Express which I had seen in prime time the year before.  I remember that Hatari! followed it but it was too late for me to see it.  And so I missed my first chance to watch a John Wayne movie.  I also remember that year I had a chance to watch The Treasure of Sierra Madre on tv, but I didn't bother after the first twenty mintues.

  8. This week I saw six movies:  Morning for the Osone Family I'm afraid seemed less like the movie that showed the director's true feelings once freed from the restraints of the Showa Dictatorship, than a movie inclined to satisfy the new occupying power.  Rich and Famous did not make that much of an impression on me.  Having seen Candace Bergen for several years in "Murphy Brown," it's a bit surprising to see Jacqueline Bisset as the more sympathetic character.  The movie did not get good reviews at the time or now in retrospect.  Yet I feel like rereading the reviews since at least one admirer of Cukor finds hidden depths.  The Crimson Kimono is full of interesting ideas, reminding us that Samuel Fuller was certainly the most intriguing of B-Movie directors.  The performances strike me as a weakness:  Pickup on South Street this isn't.  The First Deadly Sin I watched for an interesting reason:  the sequel to the original novel was serialized in the Sunday (actually Saturday) funnies around the time the movie came out.  As such Frank Sinatra gives an interesting performance, even if the conclusion seems poorly thought out and crowd pleasing in a reactionary way.  The Ceremony was the most interesting movie of the week, and certainly the better of the two Jacqueline Bisset movies that I saw.  Stranger by the Lake is a thoughtful skilful thriller, with very explicit gay sex scenes.  One can empathize with the basic concept:  overwhelming sexual desire overriding basic common sense, though I suppose I would find the movie more effective if I found the central pair erotic, instead of unwise.

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  9. If there were the Oscars in 1915, The Birth of a Nation might have won the award for best picture. Good thing Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture in 1929.  I would not want The Birth of a Nation to be the first picture to win the award.

    I disagree.  Feature films have to start somewhere, but even if The Birth of a Nation is beyond the pale, that's still no excuse for choosing Wings over Sunrise, The Crowd and The Circus.

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  10.  I saw three films this week.  Salt for Svanetia was clearly the best, with Kalatazov's trademark style in what is probably very questionable ethnography.  This Changes Everything would probably have been better if Naomi Klein had reversed the ratio of audience self-congratulation to anti-capitalist activism.  The Skeleton Twins was competent, but not particularly inspired.  Although Bill Hader and Karen Wiig gave good performances, there wasn't anything especially touching or clever or profound.

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