skimpole

We don't have enough foreign film stars in summer under the stars. If we had Chishu Ryu we could have an Ozu film festival! (If we had either Catherine Denueve or Gene Kelly again we could also show The Young Girls of Rochefort which we've never had on.)

I would say Satantango is a great movie that is hard to watch since who has seven hours to watch it? I also suspect that most people's problems with watching Guess who's coming to dinner? is that it's the very opposite of a great movie.

Well on Friday I finished (re?)reading Lindsay Hughes' Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, and am trying to get through Thackery's endless Pendennis. Incidentally Speedracer, Nick and Nora aren't that much closer in age in the movie. Powell was 13 years and four days older than Loy.

My top 10 for 1995 would be very different: 1. Richard III 2. The Usual Suspects 3. Se7en 4. Twelve Monkeys 5. Dead Man 6. Underground 7. City of Lost Children 8. The White Balloon 9. Fallen Angels 10. Cyclo If I were only to confine myself to English language films, I'm not sure what I would pick. Heat for a start, would be there. I suppose also Toy Story and Dead Man Walking. Probably Leaving Las Vegas, Casino, Clueless, Babe, Sense and Sensibility, or Batman Forever.. Conceivably Mighty Aphrodite and While you were Sleeping.

Five movies also this week: I've always had problems with Young Mr. Lincoln especially its hagiographic and pseudo-historical elements. But it's clearly superior to Abe Lincoln in Illinois: It's visually superior, it's more subtle, Henry Fonda is a better actor than Raymond Massey, and Massey's performance is basically show-boating humble man of the people. (The real Lincoln was, by his own free admission, very ambitious. And his friends didn't call him Abe.) On the other hand it's nice that we see part of "A house Divided" speech. Field of Dreams is as underwhelming as I thought it would be (and a scene involving censorship was really shameless, preventing my sympathy with the rest of the movie). There are a number of movies called Leviathan, the one I saw is a documentary about fishing trawlers, with little attention paid to the people doing the fishing, but a lot of attention paid to the fish scooped up, and with some impressive shots of flying birds. There may be a better movie in The Divorcee and in Norma Shearer's performance, but the two male leads are such dull drips the movie quickly loses any potential. So the movie of the week is The Man I killed, also known as Broken Lullaby, a rare Lubitsch drama, and a Lionel Barrymore performance that does him credit.

I haven't seen Coming Home (and for that time Same Time, Next Year, the other best actress nominee I haven't seen). In its absence I'm inclined to say that Liv Ullmann was the best actress of 1978.

Actually I like the Coward/Gielgud scene, Charles Boyer as a balloonist, Cedric Hardwicke as Fogg's fellow traveller in India, and, of course, Buster Keaton.

Notorious may show up often on TCM America roverrocks, but Canadians never seem to get see it, along with not seeing Foreign Correspondent, The Long Voyage Home, and especially Grand Illusion.

Clearly TCM should show Distant Voices, Still Lives since its absence from these top ten lists is alarming.

It's more subtle than one might think from the Masterpiece Theatre ambience. I recall Tess having to be taught whistling by Alec, how Angel's flute-playing segues into the sound of a buzzling fly, and the strange groundsman at the hotel Angel arrives at the climax.

Well BeverlyBuzzby you probably wouldn't like Come and See or The Ascent. Edited by: skimpole on Feb 10, 2014 10:11 PM

I saw five movies this week, including two I unreservedly admired. Considering that there were only ten movies I saw last week that fell into that category that's fairly impressive. Babette's Feast isn't a bad movie, and I suppose I might enjoy it more if I cared for high cuisine. And it's nice that Birgitte Federspiel appeared in something after Ordet. Computer Chess is an odd little movie, after computer programmers trying to build computer chess programs in the early eighties. It has some not terribly amusing nerd humor, some peculiar touches, and some more ominous ones. I suppose it's only fair to point out that other critics found this more engaging than I did. Nebraska, by contrast, is easily the most irritating of this year's best picture nominees. I am not an Alexander Payne fan, and the contempot is easy in this sneering portait of small town pettiness in gleaming black and white uglyvision. I didn't think that spending 115 minutes watching Payne dribble crumbs of compassion to Bruce Dern's character would be a pleasant experience. But I was still unpleasantly surpised to see how clumsily Payne stitched in some last minute upliftedness after spending two thirds of the movie in considerable scorn. Her by contrast strikes me as Spike Jonze's best movie, and surprisingly erotic given that the "male gaze" has to work with a disembodied voice. It's also an interesting picture of artificial intelligence, comparable to HAL 2000 and Joel Haley Osment in A.I. But the best movie I saw this week is Blue in the Warmest Color, which provided a genuinely complex picture of a teenager/young woman in love. Leaving aside the nudity one wonders why Hollywood doesn't learn more about how to make romantic movies from this kind of movie.

American Hustle: Quick Change with delusions of grandeur Nebraska: Alexander Payne's movie about why he's so glad he doesn't live there anymore.

In reply to Dargo, I would say that it takes some time for Peter Finch to lose his marbles in Network. It also takes some time for viewers to realize how crazy General Ripper is and how ineffective Captain Mandrake and President Muffley are in Dr. Strangelove.

Thanks to the movies I saw last month, I can how honestly say I have a top 10 for 1931: 1. M 2. City Lights 3. Monkey Business 4. Tabu 5. La Chienne 6. Le Million 7. Blonde Crazy 8. The Smiling Lieutenant 9. Enthusiasm 10. Platinum Blonde

If it were up to me the oldest living best actress would be Lauren Bacall (1944: To Have and Have Not ) and Jean-Paul Belmendo (1965: Pierrot le Fou).

Last week I saw five movies. It's generally thought that Harold Lloyd is shallower than Chaplin and Keaton, and seeing Speedy I'm inclined to agree. Lloyd only wants a better deal from the corrupt businessman molesting his girlfriend's father's business. And that's just the sort of attitude one might expect from a suddenly rich man in the twenties. Also, it takes half the movie for it to get really started. But once it does it's fairly enjoyable: not as good as Safety Last or The Kid Brother but better than the other Lloyd movies. Dallas Buyers Club is better than the parody title that comes to mind, Philadelphia, Texas suggests. On the one hand it's irritating that McConaghy may be rewarded for giving a good performance, after nearly two decades as one of the most insufferable players in Hollywood, when I think we should wait to see if he could give a better performance. Also, some of the attacks on medical orthodoxy seem a bit dodgy. Any Wednesday is a ghastly mistake, one of those sixites sex comedies that is casually insulting to women. Even though Jason Robards is a thoroughly unlikeable character, he is so mcuh a better actor than Dean Jones one wants him to win regardless. Divine Intervention is a Palestinian black comedy, not entirely unlike You the Living, but more cinematically successful. It's a sort of po-faced aburdism, united by the stresses of living under the Israeli occupation. (A sample of its humor has a tourist asking a Jerusalem policeman for directions to the Church of the Holy Sepluchre. After a bit of confusion, the policeman goes to his car and extracts a blindfolded prisoner to see if he can help.) So I suppose the movie of the week is Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm, his visually striking if morally underwhelming portrait of the five year plan.

One problem I had with American Hustle is that the director made clear what we were to think of the characters within the first 90 seconds we saw them (or when we are reintroduced to Bale, Adams and Cooper after the opening scene.) I was wondering if there was a great film where the characters were presented that obviously. You can't include sequels, or series of movies like the Marx Brothers or Astaire/Rogers movies. And the viewer can be assumed to know nothing about the character, even for ones as well known as Dracula or Sherlock Holmes.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God Akira Kurosawa's Dreams Angel Heart Black Cat White Cat Blade Runner Bram Stoker's Dracula Celine and Julie go Boating Chelsea Girls Chungking Express The City of Lost Children A Clockwork Orange The Colour of Pomegranates Daisies Dead Man Delicatassen Dear Ringers Don't Look Now Down by Law The Enigma of Kasper Hauser The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Ghost World Je T'Atime, Je t'aime Landscape in the Mist The Long Day Closes Lovers of the Arctic Circle Mememto Monty Python and the Holy Grail Monty Python and the Meaning of Life Murder by Contract Naked One from the Heart The Others Perseopolis Peter Ibbetson Pink Floyd: the Wall Quadrophenia Red Psalm Requiem for a Dream The Rocky Horror Picture Show The Shining Sonatine South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut Stalker Stop Making Sense Time Bandits Underground The White Balloon Winter Soldier Yellow Submarine

Sepiatone, the US would have had an interstate highway system even if Eisenhower had never been elected. The vote for it was at least 9-1 in Congress. Nixon, as a senator from California, fairly young and coming from the opposite end of the country as the rest of the Republican leaders, was always a possible choice for high office. The main limit on his career is that the Republican party may have revived before anyone thought to sponsor him as a congressman. Edited by: skimpole on Jan 27, 2014 3:35 AM

Interestingly, I watched 203 movies last year. This week I watched seven movies. Philomena is an inoffensive movie, a little irritating in its conventional beats, and there is a problem with the second half of the movie. The movie almost feels, how can we drag this out, and the surprise at the end of it happens only because nobody asks an obvious question. Captain Phillips has its own problems. It's supposed to be a tense hostage drama. But it's not a big spoiler to note that Phillips survives, and that his testimony is the basis for the film. So although the situation is understandably dangerous, the overwhelming military superiority on the part of the US Navy and the sheer lack of experience of the Somali hijackers means that this movie will only end one way, and it takes forever for that to happen. You can't learn to plow by reading books is an experimental first feature by Richard Linklater, and it's not surprising that in future movies he would have his characters talk. Blonde Crazy is actually a very impressive Cagney movie, and it should be better known. Edison the Man is watchable because of a very good Spencer Tracy performance, even if one suspects that Edison was not really like that. There was a Father is another striking movie by Ozu, with Chishu Ryo giving a superb performance as a father instilled with a sense of duty. It doesn't have quite the punch of The Only Son, and its emphasis on self-sacrifice has sinister undertones given the second world war happening at the time. Rollercoaster isn't devoid of suspense, and it's striking that it's actually Richard Widmark who actually saves the day. But to have Timothy Bottoms run away from George Segal, to escape from the police with suspicious ease, to run around the rollercoaster for no good purpose, to meet Segal suddenly and then be killed by the rollercoaster is just incompetent.

The most likely world in which there was no second world war was if instead of Hitler being in power, there was a saner authoritarian regime that bided its time to attack the Soviet Union. Likewise there would be a similar, slightly more moderate regime in Japan. FDR wouldn't have run again in the absence of war, and it is possible that a conservative democrat (like vice-president John Garner) would have won the nomination. Dewey would probably have won the Republican nomination (Wilkie wouldn't have been a factor without a war). With that in mind, there would probably have been a shift to the right in the 1940 election. The economy would have been sluggish and anti-deficit plans would have kept it that way. Anti-communism would have been stronger, and there may been support for supporting Germany against the Soviet Union. Certainly this might have encouraged the red scare a decade earlier, and there might have been more suspicion of Jewish directors.

I saw four movies over the last two weeks. The Smiling Lieutenant is not considered to be one of Lubitsch's best musicals, which in turn are not considered to be as good as Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner, or To be or not to be. But it's well worth watching. American Hustle to me was disappointing, a facile crowd pleaser which seems likely to win the Oscar nominee most likely to flatter Academy voter narcissism. The Talk of the Town was also disappointing, with Stevens having the kind of ponderous, gutless earnestness that would disfigure his later serious films. Slacker is interesting, or it starts out interesting, but moving from one conversation to another for 100 minutes with no character ever meeting one another again is a bit of a haul. Plus the ratio of crackpot theorists to creepy womanizers is alarmingly high, and suggests that Linklater doesn't quite have the brains to be America's Rohmer.

I'm voting for Fedya: yay foreign films.

It's also worth pointing out that the best picture nominations leave something to be desired as well: Nominees that won and were actually the best Picture of the year: All Quiet on the Western Front, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons, The Godfather, Annie Hall, Schindler's List, The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King The best nominees that were actually the best picture of the year: The Thin Man, Top Hat, Grand Illusion, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, It's a Wonderful Life, Sunset Blvd., 12 Angry Men, Cries and Whispers, Barry Lyndon, All the President's Men, Apocalypse Now, Tess, Raiders of the Lost Ark, JFK, Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential, Saving Private Ryan, The Pianist, There will be Blood, The Tree of Life The best nominees that deserved to be nominated for best picture of the year: One Hour with You, Little Women, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Awful Truth, the Philadelphia Story, Double Indemnity, Great Expectations, The Red Shoes, Around the World in 80 Days, Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, Oliver!, Z. Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather Part II, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, Born on the fourth of July, Goodfellas, The Crying Game, Secrets and Lies, The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring, Up, Toy Story 3, Lincoln The best nominees that almost deserved to be nominated for best picture of the year: The Heiress, An American in Paris, The Quiet Man, Mister Roberts, Anatomy of a Murder, The Apartment, West Side Story, Doctor Zhivago, Bonnie and Clyde, The Last Picture Show, The Deer Hunter, The Right Stuff, The Killing Fields, The Mission The best nominees that are perfectly enjoyable: The Bells of St. Mary's, Cleopatra, Dangerous Liaisons, The Insider, Erin Brockovich, The Aviator, The Departed, Slumdog Millionaire The best nominees that are perfectly reasonable: Trader Horn, From Here to Eternity, Out of Africa, Babe, Capote The best nominees that are actually irritating oscarbait: Wings*, The Broadway Melody*, Gigi (I haven't seen the other nominees for 1927-1928, and 1928-1929, hence the asterisks. Sunrise, of course, deserves to be nominated for a best picture.)